Publications

“ ‘Traditional Birth Attendants’ and Reproductive Expertise in Post-Colonial Mali” Gender and History, Vol 33, No. 3, October 2021.

Si vous souhaitez une copie de cet article en français, merci de me contacter par email.

“Last Acts of Mothering: Nuptial Counseling in Colonial Mali” Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue Supplement_15, December 2020, Pages 239–262.

Si vous souhaitez une copie de cet article en français, merci de me contacter par email.

Book Project

My book project “Reproductive Labors: Women’s Expertise, Activism, and Medicalized Childbirth in Mali, 1935-1999,” examines how families in southern Mali sought to ensure successful conception, pregnancy and childbirth in the context of high maternal and infant mortality. Over the 20th century, many people living in southern Mali (Kayes, Koulikoro, Bamako, Segou, and Sikasso regions) relied on local reproductive specialists. These included excisers (who oversaw initiation and circumcision ceremonies), nuptial counselors (who provided sexual education at marriage), and midwives. Even as the biomedical maternal health system expanded, for many people, the work of these older women specialists remained vital to proper reproduction. However, other Malian women and their families, feminist activists, medical professionals, and non-profit workers began to debate the importance of local reproductive practices.

Part 1 of the book explores the role of specialist labor in socializing sexuality and gender norms. I first demonstrate how, following the end of slavery in the early 20th century, Malian families used nuptial counseling to instill concepts of honorable sexuality and demonstrate status at marriage. After Mali’s independence in 1960s, there was public outcry over unwed mothers, although nuptial counselors and women activists affiliated with the state had different visions of extra/marital sexuality and adolescence. Part 2 focuses on reproductive health interventions. It returns to the colonial period to explore how the colonial maternal health system relied on external actors, from benevolent associations to Malian midwives, all of whom defined women’s bodies as childbearing bodies. Successive post-colonial governments sought to develop policies to ensure rural health access, toggling between training medical professionals to work in rural places and training local specialists, such as midwives, in biomedical techniques. The integration of midwives into biomedical clinics created substantial overlap between various therapeutic interventions. Many of the critiques of midwifery were also applied to excision. From the 1970s Malian participation in anti-excision activism owed as much to national debates over marriage, unwed mothers, and rural maternity care as to transnational feminist movements and developmentalist interventions.

Reproductive Labors is based on interdisciplinary research in Mali, Senegal, France, and the US, including archival research, oral histories, and ethnographic work. In addition to working in national archives, the project engages with material conserved in private archives, student theses, and bureaucratic records from institutions such as Mali’s National Health Directorate. However, women’s specialist labor is often not visible in archival material. In response to this elision of gendered knowledge, I undertook ethnographic observation at weddings and conducted Bamanakan and French-language oral history interviews with women specialists, as well as medical personnel and gender-rights activists.

The book demonstrates how Malians were socialized into heterosexuality not simply through family or media, but through specific specialist interventions which linked heterosexuality to biological reproduction and gendered identities. Reproductive specialists’ expertise was defined by their gender, skill, age, and social status, as most were older women of endogamous social group descent. Conversely, the activists who campaigned against them were usually highly-educated young women with close ties to international feminist institutions. Over the 20th century, questions about which group should have authority over young women’s reproductive experiences led to numerous debates for women and their families. Secondly, this project demonstrates that the continued value of local specialists for Malians, alongside the medical system’s reliance on external actors and instability in rural areas, created a specific form of Malian biomedicine driven as much by local therapeutic practices and social hierarchies as by international norms. Finally, the project also argues that reproductive health was not simply a subfield of the post-colonial Malian health system. Rather, I suggest that we should see it as central to post-colonial governance; for example, maternal health projects became a key site for innovation in governance, such as new forms of taxation as well as for relationships between national governments and international organizations.

My research and writing have been supported by a Doris G. Quinn Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and a CLIR Mellon Doctoral Research Fellowship in Original Sources, as well as by the New York Historical Society Early Career Scholars Workshop, Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Hoover Institution Fellowship GSAS International Travel Fellowship, Alliance Doctoral Mobility Grant, and Institute for African Studies Leitner Award.

Additional Projects

“Interracial Marriage and Political Authority in Colonial Northern Cameroun.” (Manuscript in preparation).

Based on archival research in Yaoundé and Maroua, this microhistory traces the experiences of a French-Cameroonian couple living in Mokolo in the 1950s. It argues that racialized ideas of class remained central to French colonial rule in rural Cameroon, even as this rule was being challenged by the Union des Populations du Cameroun.