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== Stratified reproduction describes the physical and social tasks that are associated with reproduction and parenthood and how they are allocated and negotiated with respect to inequalities rooted in class, race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, migrant status, and more.[1] ==

Original Conception

 * The term "stratified reproduction" was coined by sociologist Shellee Colen in 1986. Colen employed the term in her article "With Respect and Feelings:" Voice of West Indian Child Care and Domestic Workers in New York City in All American Women: A Line that Divides, Ties that Bind, a book edited by Johnnetta B. Cole.  The term evolved out of her ethnographic research on the dynamics between West Indian women working in the households and with the children of United States' families, particularly because of how each party understood and felt about the relationship and its dynamics differently. Colen draws from Evelyn Nakano Glenn' s definition of social reproduction that includes the "creation and recreation of people as cultural and social, as well as physical human beings."
 * Ginsburg and Rapp explain how the term applies to activities concerning having or not having children, primarily examining “power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nuture and reproduce, while others are disempowered… [and] arrangements by which some reproductive futures are valued while others are despised.” (1995, p3).

Other applications

 * The term has been expounded upon, particularly by those working in the field of anthropology of reproduction, to consider topics such as entitlement to parenthood, adoption at both the international and national level, and new reproductive technologies.
 * Fellow anthropologists, Rayna Rapp and Faye D. Ginsburg, assert that the term extends to enfranchise the "power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered."  The line between who is empowered to rear their own children, who is qualified to care for a child, and who should participate in both or neither activity is somewhat fluid across cultures. To this effect, Rapp and Ginsburg discuss how, within the United States, wealthier women are expected to want to maintain their lifestyles and have been, over time, given the freedom to do so by hiring outside help.
 * Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila looked at similar circumstances of Latina women who are caring for children of families in the United States when they have left their own families in a different country and are now involved in reproductive, caregiving work in order to provide as a mother to their own children.
 * Laura Mamo and Eli Alston-Stepnitz describe the conditions that impact LGBTQ people access to family formation services and assess the dynamics that cause queer people to not be evenly welcomed into biomedical offerings and fertility practices.  In their research, they explore the nuances of which couples and individuals are able to gain access to these services based on various social characteristics, including race and socio-economic status.
 * Ann Pollock's research into anonymous paid egg donors identified the “socially useful role in reproducing privilege” and how it depends upon an altruist narrative that egg donors have feminine motivations and support the structure of the nuclear family. In her work, she identifies how women of color are often used as gestational surrogates, white women were egg donors, and wealthier white women are “The Mothers.”  She likens stratified reproduction to Foucault’s concept of biopower as biopower represents a broader means by which the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” is instilled within populations.
 * Siân M Beynon-Jones applies Colen’s notion of stratified reproduction in order to analyze the expectations of motherhood in 21st Century Britain and the ways in which feminist scholarship has specifically discussed the regulation of abortion within the UK. The critique suggests that feminist theorists have not adequately engaged the concept of stratified reproduction in their considerations of abortion, in part because of the empirical materials that have been used to construct the existing critiques.
 * In Paola Bonizzoni’s research, she examines how immigrant status impacts both civic and reproductive stratification by studying Latino populations in Milan, Italy. Through this work, she seeks to understand the social position of immigrant populations, how employment, migrant, and social status impact the options available to these people, and the light in which certain choices are cast.
 * In The Gambia, kanyaleng kafoos are groups of women who deal with infertility or child loss that provide social, emotional, and sometimes financial support to women unable to match the cultural reproductive ideal of a large family. These women undergo individual fertility-seeking journeys and collective “God-begging” ceremonies in an effort to improve their reproductive health. By the analysis of Carolyn Hough, The Gambia already does not highly prioritize reproductive health and, within that agenda, infertility is particularly ignored. Hough performed ethnographic fieldwork with a small number of these groups and posits that the use of a stratified reproduction framework could be utilized to expand The Gambia’s sexual and reproductive health agenda to challenge reproductive norms that harm women with expectations of large families without sufficient reproductive health services. By understanding the impact of infertility on Gambian women through a stratified reproduction lens, the sexual and reproductive health agenda of Gambia can be refocused to support women and men’s reproductive gold and decrease the prevalence of STIs, miscarriages, stillbirths, and child mortality.

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