Reproductive (in)justice in Coahuila, Mexico: an ethnography of obfuscation, violence, and feminist care

Thesis

While global health efforts emphasize clinical factors and technical solutions to address maternal mortality, obstetric violence and other forms of reproductive injustice remain crucial contributors to preventable deaths worldwide. Bringing together critical and phenomenological medical anthropology with decolonial and feminist political-economic approaches, this thesis argues that reproductive injustice in Coahuila, Mexico cannot be understood solely through the lens of legal rights, health coverage, or biomedical access. Rather, this thesis proposes the concept of care obfuscation as the political, structural and embodied practice of claiming access, coverage, and humanization while simultaneously obscuring the lived realities of neglect, abandonment, and violence in care settings. In responding to this obfuscation and to address broader forms of reproductive injustice, including obstetric violence, feminist colectivas and community birth workers in Coahuila enact alternative infrastructures of care rooted in apapacho: a relational, generative, and socially situated practice that foregrounds care as a collective healing experience. Chapter 1 traces how the State allows for the infra-structural conditions that produce, perpetuate, and normalize violence in care settings, particularly by obscuring the gap between policy and lived experience. Chapter 2 delves into the apapacho-woven alternative infrastructures of care enacted by colectivas and birth workers, articulating how these practices restore connection, dignity, and autonomy for those giving and receiving care. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the constructions around different kinds of reproductive bodies to show how these biosocial distinctions serve to obfuscate reproductive labor, normalizing reproductive and gendered violence against women and girls.

Authors: Alton Martelet, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-pmbjdzx99
• Type of award: MPhil
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: obstetric violence; care obfuscation; reproductive justice; maternal mortality; apapacho
• Subjects: Medical anthropology; Postcolonial criticism; Feminist theory