One of the nation’s premier universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently featured a speaker who gave a talk, “On the Coloniality of Abortion Bans.”
On Oct. 21, the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted Harvard Professor Durba Mitra as part of its “Articulating Abortion” lecture series. The event’s description states that “colonial-era abortion bans” led to “policing and carceral power.”
“In this lecture, Prof. Durba Mitra (Harvard University, WGS) will reflect on the history of abortion in South Asia and the legacies of racism and sexual control rooted in colonialism that shape present-day debates about reproductive rights and bodily autonomy,” an event description reads.
“Colonial-era abortion bans in the nineteenth century catalyzed the massive expansion of infrastructures of knowledge about sexuality that became foundational for new forms of policing and carceral power, from practices of community surveillance to new evidentiary forms that made deviancy visible through evidence of the body,” the web page continues. “[Mitra] offers a genealogy of the coloniality of abortion as a lens to understand the intimate relationship of carceral power and the control of reproduction in our present.”
Mitra serves as an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and has written books like Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now and Indian Sex Life. Her work “brings together feminist studies, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history,” according to her Harvard biography.
Mitra has also taught classes like “Who Run the World? Feminism in the Age of Empire,” “Feminist and Queer Theories of Difference,” and “The Sexual Life of Colonialism.”
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Since 2022, MIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies program has held various pro-abortion speakers. Past lectures include: “Reproductive Justice: Global Movements and Wins,” “Centering the Margins: Fight for Reproductive Justice and Body Sovereignty,” “The Urgency of Representing Abortion,” and “Abortion Rights as Human Rights: The Continuing Fight for Reproductive Justice.”
The program also offers courses on topics such as “Intersectionality, Neurodiversity, and Disability,” “Narrative and Identity: Writing and Film by Contemporary Women of Color,” and “Feminist and Queer Theories.”
Campus Reform has contacted MIT, Professor Durba Mitra, and the Women’s and Gender Studies program for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
