Birth Control Environs
This two-year post-doctoral research funded by a Marie Sklodowska Curie scholarship had as its main objective to learn how young women striving for chemical-free contraception negotiate feminist and environmental sensibilities with regards to their contraceptive choices, with a focus on individual practices and political action. This project took place mainly in Paris and its periphery. Some of the research participants were based in the French countryside and in Belgium.
In order to explore the main question I conducted participant observation and in depth interviews with young feminists involved in practices where sexual and reproductive health and a concern with environmental issues intersected. Eco-feminist events and self-help and auto-gynaecology groups turned out to be key spaces of inquiry.
As it is more often than not the case with ethnographic research, initial questions change once confronted with the reality of the field. It soon became clear that the ethnographic material collected, individual trajectories and practices and their extension into public activities, was best appreciated in relation to the dominant contraceptive model in France, and the way it is engrained in the profession of medical gynaecology, and in the relation between patients and gynaecologists. This model heavily relies on the systematic prescription of contraceptive hormones. Most individual trajectories and public actions were structured in contestation to such model.
The institute that hosted my project, the Center for Research, Medicine, Health, Mental Health, Science and Society (CERMES3), and the Junior Research Laboratory on Gender and Contraception (LabJu Contraception & Genre), which I came to join, contributed enormously to improving my understanding of the French contraceptive model and the place of contraceptive hormones in it.
Performance at eco-feminist and witchcraft festival in Montreuil, France (Rios Sandoval 2020).
Two major themes were also significantly present and were explored to unanticipated depth. The first one is the bodily and affective apprehension of everyday toxicity, which in this context is critically attuned to the effects of EDCs and contraceptive hormones. The second is an ontological exploration of hormones and hormone like chemicals, that is: how can we understand what these chemicals are, once they are studied through and beyond bodies, beyond the clinician’s office, and into landscapes?
The sound and film work I have carried out branched out from this project, as explorations of the relationships between bodies, toxicity, landscapes, personal and political action that recurrently emerged in conversations with young feminists.
Research insights will be shared through publications and a trans-disciplinary exhibit.
This research received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 838680