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Biopolitics, Risk, And Reproductive Justice: The Governing Of Maternal Health In Canada's Muskoka Initiative, Jacqueline Potvin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine how Canada’s Muskoka Initiative discursively constructs and addresses maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) as a global development problem. I evaluate how the Muskoka Initiative aligns with, and departs from feminist articulations of sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice. I do this by analyzing how the Muskoka Initiative drew on and reinforced dominant norms of motherhood, and aligned with neoliberal development frameworks. I also examine how the reproductive bodies and lives of women in the Global South were configured as sites of both development intervention and biopolitical governance. My findings are based on a …