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Population is a dangerous political category. It is not separable from the racist and class-based valorisation and devaluation of different lives. From global contraceptive implant programmes to right wing anti-immigration discourses, demographic interpretations of multiple current crises legitimise the states' grip on childbearing and mobility. The results are complex dimensions of reproductive racism and restrictive border regimes. Meanwhile, global social inequalities and racial capitalist extractivism stay out of the game.
The book analyses how demographic knowledge production and states’ grip to the variable of population intertwine. It introduces the concept of the Malthusian matrix in order to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies within population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies and behaviours.
Several chapters explore current reproductive racism, establishing a hierarchy between the birth of desirable and undesirable people. An upward redistributive family policy in Germany is promoting births within the privileged middle classes. And international population programs revive targets in order to increase the use of long-acting contraceptives in the Global South, within a market-oriented setting of Big Pharma promotion. Reproductive racism is also effective in migration policy strategies: narratives about "migrant birth rates" circulate among ultra-right forces as well as seemingly apolitical demographic policy consultancy. The last sections discuss state-theoretical approaches and the intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice in order to provide tools for critique and resistance.
“This book makes a compelling case for the centrality of population policies and ideologies to ra-cism, coloniality and global capitalism. Crucially, it demonstrates how the openly Malthusian agen-das of today’s ascendant far-right are inextricable from a long and complex history of neoliberal populationism. Yet the book also offers reasons to hope, through listening to feminist activists in Brazil who are reimagining concepts of reproductive justice”—Kalpana Wilson, Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London.
Introduction; Acknowledgments; Part I Blaming ‘Population’ for Multiple Crises; 1.Exploring the Multidimensional Concept of Demographization: The Case of Germany; Part II Projecting Migration: Dangerous Statistical Narratives; 2.Demographic Futurity: On the Power of Statistical Assumption Politics; 3.‘Too High’ or ‘Too Low’? Segregated Migrants’ Birth Rates as Common Ground for Völkisch and Utilitarian Nationalisms; Part III Averting Births: Political Economy and Statehood; 4.Transnational Antinatalism : Simplistic Narratives and Big Pharma Interests 99 in Collaboration with Daniel Bendix; 5.Theorizing processes of NGOization and the State :The Case of the Cairo Consensus; Part IV Resisting: Reproductive Justice; 6.Intersectional Convivialities : Brazilian Black and Popular Feminist Approaches to the Justiça Reprodutiva Framework; Epilogue: Opposing the Malthusian Matrix; Notes on Author and Collaborator; Index