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Browsing Political Science by Subject "Abortifacients"
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Item Open Access Plant-Based Contraceptives and Bioprospecting in the Americas: A Genealogy of Petiveria alliacea(2025-04-10) O'Donnell, Rachel Tucker; Whitworth, Sandra L.This doctoral dissertation examines Petiveria alliacea, an overlooked but politically significant plant used for contraception throughout the Americas. Plant materials are often referred to as the ‘raw materials’ for development and biotechnology, but they are in fact the products of local innovation by individual communities. The science of botany frequently disregards the questions of historical and cultural process, as well as the social, political, and economic relationships involved in the creation of pharmaceutical contraceptives and their connection to natural knowledge. This dissertation seeks to redress this. Rarely do we see the concepts in the field of Feminist Science Studies brought into conversation with imperial political processes. By using Foucault’s concept of genealogy alongside key works in Feminist Science Studies, we see how gender is collapsed, both symbolically and materially, onto the process of knowledge production. I draw on Sandra Harding’s concepts of knowledge (2011), as varied and specific to geographic space and culture. This analytical framework is used to explore the political history of Petiveria alliacea in the Americas, from early modern exploration among European physician-botanists and the plant’s ‘discovery’ in the Caribbean to its contemporary use as a menstrual regulator in a highland Mayan community in Guatemala. This dissertation argues that what is now known as Petiveria alliacea in the field and the laboratory has been constituted through the gendered knowledge, discourses, and practices of local communities, as well as the Western development of ‘botany’ as a field of study and ‘science’ as a category and a method. It analyzes primary sources related to Petiveria alliacea and botanical research on abortifacient plants throughout the Americas, including USDA expeditions in the twentieth century and original documents related to the development of the birth control pill. The concluding study of a particular region’s knowledge about Petiveria demonstrates a local resistance to Western forms of health care and pharmaceutical application, and opens up a new line of inquiry in the study of gender and politics.