PhD Defense by Amber Brooks
The IUD Post-Dobbs: A Situational Analysis
Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 11:00 am EDT, GT Library Dissertation Defense Room, Price Gilbert 4222

Abstract
Evolving from early twentieth-century cervical caps and stem pessaries, the modern intrauterine device (IUD) embodies advancements in materials and insertion technologies. With a complex history in the United States, scholars have widely criticized mid-twentieth-century population control programs’ deployment of the IUD and the harmful failed Dalkon Shield IUD in the 1970s. Yet, the modern IUD was becoming stabilized as a contraceptive and menstrual suppression technology in the 2010s. However, the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a historical inflection point; in the socio-political realm post-Dobbs, the IUD is a destabilized and contested medical technology. Situated in the post-Dobbs IUD arena in the United States, my dissertation analyzes how the IUD and the subjectivity of woman are co-constructed by the Far-Right Social World, the mechanisms by which access to IUDs and other contraceptives are being contracted, and sites of resistance therein. From a situational analysis methodology (Clarke 2005; Clarke et al. 2018) and grounding my thinking in the concepts of biopower and governmentality (Foucault 1975), I engaged with the theoretical frameworks of biocitizenship (Rose 2007; Petryna 2013; Pollock 2015; Epstein 2022) and anticipatory motherhood (Waggoner 2017). In this case study of the IUD, I illustrate that discursive constructions of the IUD cannot be extricated from core ideas about citizenship, from the construction of woman as biopolitical subject in the United States. Actors and groups within the Far-Right Social World make a political claim to the responsibilization of the female subject in society. I argue that this responsibilization of women and girls as perpetually pre-pregnant biopolitical subjects of the State reinforces biblically-based gender roles, increases surveillance of women’s bodies, and exacerbates structural inequalities in healthcare access. Further, actors and groups within the Far-Right Social World aim to shape and control boundary infrastructures, such as scientific knowledge, pharmaceutical device and drug classifications, law, and public policy—ultimately seeking political and legal legitimation of their ideology. I assert that the material impacts of the disperse deployment of biopower, governmentality, and governance can be understood as conflicting with long-established rights to privacy, to bodily autonomy, and to the pursuit of health–and, therefore, as fundamentally anti-democratic. Current investigations of women’s rights and healthcare access must be combined with understandings of biopower, biocitizenship, and material impacts of far-right ideology.

Committee: 
Dr. Jennifer Singh (Advisor) – School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Amit Prasad – School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Mary McDonald – School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. William Winders – School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Chikako Takeshita – Department of Society, Environment and Health Equity, University of California-Riverside