Beauty and the Black: Aesthetics Politics and Black Reproduction in Brazil

Ugo Edu

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Anthropology

UC Davis

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4

12:00PM

Black Forum Room, Haines Hall 153

lunch will be provided

Based on ethnographic research in Salvador, Bahia, this talk explores the role of aesthetics in the construction and perception of what constitutes healthy reproduction and reproductive practices. I draw on women’s navigations within a Brazilian economy of aesthetics, race, and sexuality and the way these navigations shape and are shaped by processes and procedures related to the governance and measurements of reproduction and reproductive health. I focus on Black women’s experiences of contraceptive use, attempts to acquire tubal ligations, and family construction. I analyze the way that values, sensibilities, and affect that have come to adhere to particular appearances and arrangements, have also adhered to the perception and apprehension of reproductive decision-making (seen and unseen, articulated and not-articulated), reproductive health, and family constructions. This work points to the importance of an understanding and recognition of the aesthetic underpinnings of health and biomedical systems.

Dr. Ugo Edu is a medical anthropologist, currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Previously, she was the Science, Justice, and Health Equity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University. She received her PhD from the joint Medical Anthropology program at University of California, San Francisco/UC Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her scholarship has a strong interdisciplinary approach to issues of aesthetics, affect, race, gender, body knowledge and modification, and social justice. In her research, she focuses on the politics of reproduction, reproductive and sexual health, and health inequities in both global and national contexts. She situates her work at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies.