"Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization" by Khiara Bridges

Khiara Bridges

Deposited 2008

Abstract
This dissertation is based on fifteen months of fieldwork research in the obstetrics clinic of Alpha Hospital—during which daily participant-observation was conducted and over 150 hours of interviews were taken of patients, anciallary staff, providers, and administrators. The objective of the dissertation project is to analyze the reiteration of race via law and biomedicine during the highly meaningful and palpably "reproductive" event of pregnancy. As such, it builds upon a wide body of recent theoretical and empirical work in anthropology, legal theory, and critical studies of race and racialization. The central preoccupation that motivates the research is the irony that race has endured as an omnipresent social fact with powerful material repercussion despite the fact that race has been revealed to have no moorings in biology. Dissatisfied with the mere attestation that race is a social construction, this project seeks to investigate how race is socially constructed.

The dissertation explores the significance of the absence of explicit discussions or invocations of race within the clinic. It concludes that race did not require an explicit evocation in order to racialize the indigent bodies located within the clinic. The racialization of the indigent was accomplished by a "racializing logic of class attributes," whereby the poor are analogized to the racially disempowered. As such, the patients who received prenatal care within the Alpha clinic experienced a "Blackening"/"alien"-ation—or a racial un-privileging—that was a result of their unprivileged class position. The racialization of the indigent was also accomplished by a deracialized, yet racializing discourse of "population," which functioned to elide the racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity of the patients and allow the racially-marginalized figure of the uneducated, undocumented immigrant to stand for the whole.

The dissertation demonstrates that race and racism are not as easily apprehended as they once were. Explicit and egregious demonstrations of racism are not as numerable as they were just half a century ago. No longer are persons formally dehumanized on the basis of their racial ascription and rendered into a fraction of their racial Other. Nevertheless, the implicit racialization of the Alpha patients serves to demonstrate that race need not be explicitly evoked in order for it to overdetermine the quality of persons' lives. This dissertation argues that while race was only infrequently verbalized in its own terms by persons in the Alpha obstetrics clinic, it was always extant; it was always there. The operation of race successfully produced an entire population of women as racially Other-ed possessors of despised fertility. The ethnography and legal analysis within the dissertation should be understood as a description of race as it is remade, reaffirmed, reiterated, and reconsolidated on the bodies of pregnant women seeking prenatal care in the U.S. As a study of race as a process, it is an invitation to future discussions of how we can intervene in the process in order to produce more equitable—more just—outcomes.