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Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization.



Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism.



Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Colonialism: Familiar Territory
• 1 Sexuality, Medicine, and Imperialism: The International Traffic in Prostitution Policy
• 2 Sex and Citizenship: The Politics of Prostitution in Puerto Rico, 1898-1918
• 3 Debating Reproduction: Birth Control, Eugenics, and Overpopulation in Puerto Rico, 1920-1940
• 4 Demon Mothers in the Social Laboratory: Development, Overpopulation, and "the Pill," 1940-1960
• 5 The Politics of Sterilization, 1937-1974
• 6 "I like to be in America": Postwar Puerto Rican Migration, the Culture of Poverty, and the Moynihan Report
• Epilogue
• Ghosts, Cyborgs, and Why Puerto Rico Is the Most Important Place in the World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This revised dissertation is an important but often difficult work that examines US policies of eugenics, prostitution and venereal disease control, sterilization, and birth control imposed on the Puerto Rican population, particularly women, since the end of the Spanish American War in 1898 to the present. Briggs (women's studies, Univ. of Arizona) explicitly ties arguments of US imperialism, racism, and class constructs into her analyses of how US policy makers identified Puerto Rican women's sexuality, families, and reproductive health as pathologic and needing "control" as supposed causes of overpopulation, poverty, "backwardness," and general "immorality." These policies and stereotypical "narratives of family, sex, and reproduction" are the real focus of the book, rather than Puerto Rico or Puerto Rican women themselves. While the book is most immediately useful to researchers already immersed in either Puerto Rican studies or feminist and subaltern studies focusing on women's "dangerous" sexuality, some chapters may be heavy reading for those unfamiliar with this terrain. The epilogue, a particularly brilliant explanation of the author's theoretical framework and methodology, will be instantly accessible, even to undergraduates. An important contribution to feminist and Puerto Rican historical, anthropological, and policy studies. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Advanced readers, all academic research library collections, and libraries serving Puerto Rican and Latino populations. S. A. Vega Garcia Iowa State University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Laura Briggs is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona.