UC San Diego

Reproductive health has gained new ethical and political significance in post-war Guatemala with the increasing participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the pursuit of gender and racial equality. This dissertation is concerned with the way young, marginalized women understand and re-articulate ideas about power and equality as they participate in reproductive health initiatives organized by NGOs. I analyze the political nature of this vernacularization of reproductive health by looking closely at how global discourses of social equality, human rights, development, empowerment, and decolonization are vernacularized by ordinary women in their everyday practices. As a political project, reproductive health interventions decenter questions of development and female empowerment, leading to an ongoing negotiation over the very nature of equality and rights themselves. I draw from extensive ethnographic fieldwork that traces the intimate conversations and debates between women participating in spaces of rights-based reproductive health interventions organized by both grassroots and NGOs in the highland departments of Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango.

My research critically examines ethical practices of world-making in reproductive rights workshops to ask how they act as a form of politics for marginalized women to imagine and construct a valued future. I argue that reproductive health interventions are a site where equality and the right to a “good life” are reimagined. In a region marked by significant socioeconomic precarity and religious taboo, women’s ability to assert their reproductive rights hinged on both appropriating and contesting global discourses of social justice. These intimate negotiations are a political practice rooted in Guatemalan women’s embodied experiences of gender, race, and class. My dissertation clearly illustrates how negotiating a “good life” resulted not only in emancipatory but also ambiguous realizations of these rights. This ambivalent political process raises new questions over what it means to imagine and pursue a fulfilling and valued life in neoliberal contexts, marked by the increasing relegation of social justice to apolitical and depoliticizing NGOs.