In recent decades, extremist right-wing political movements around the globe have worked to reverse decades of progress toward reproductive justice. From challenges to abortion rights, the right to parent, and access to basic healthcare and reproductive technologies, conservative actors have used law and policy to deny people bodily autonomy and self-determination. Racialized women, queer, and transgender people have been especially affected and targeted. These new political winds must be evaluated in light of the historical oppression of coloniality, as manifested through eugenic programs and eugenicist ideologies, and drawing on critical perspectives on the maintenance of white supremacy through capitalist structures. Reproductive justice is an expansive and interdisciplinary framework that emerged from grassroots organizing across the world led by Black feminists, lesbian feminists, and decolonial feminists.
Today, reproductive justice theory and activism continues to challenge men’s control over women’s bodies, eugenicist projects designed to control the reproductive choices of diverse populations, and restricted access to care and reproductive technologies for lesbians, nonbinary, and trans people. In this special issue, we seek to examine both the current challenges to reproductive justice across the globe and decolonial, anti-racist and lesbian visions of transformative reproductive justice futures. We invite contributions grounded in radical lesbian decolonial thought that dismantles systemic structures
of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. We encourage work that offers innovative ways of conceptualizing and writing about reproductive justice suggesting liberatory strategies that build coalitions across social movements.
We seek contributions focused but not limited to these topics:
• Lesbian theorization on reproductive justice and access to reproductive technologies
• Decolonial feminists' perspective and interventions in reproductive justice and reproductive
technologies
• Explorations of how environmental injustice and extractivism have an impact on reproductive
justice in diverse communities
• Linkages between feminist work on reproductive justice and gender self-determination praxis in
trans studies
• Accounts of lesbian feminist coalition building around reproductive justice
