The Cases of Forced Sterilization in Peru

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, this book analyses how Indigenous peasant women who have experienced reproductive violence describe the harms of forced sterilization and the complexities of using human and reproductive rights frameworks to make their experiences visible through law and activism. The author argues that the focus on individual choice and fertility creates dissonances and hierarchies of discourse that ultimately displace women’s embodied experiences of reproductive violence that do not fit within a repronormative framework.

Introducing dissonance as a decolonial feminist methodology, the book explores how colonial, racialized, and gendered histories shape legal and experiential incommensurability. As the first ethnography on sterilization cases in Peru, it contributes to social studies of reproduction, Latin American studies, and decolonial feminisms.