Lucía Cuba

Fashion, Biopolitics, and Social Criticism

In Peru, 300,000 women and 16,000 men were forcibly sterilized during a birth control campaign orchestrated by the Fujimori government between 1996 and 2000. In official speeches and texts, there is no trace of this chapter in history; the state has never publicly acknowledged these violent acts or compensated the victims and their families — most of them from poor, rural, Andean communities. Other examples of government-driven forced-sterilization programs (in China, the United States, India, Sweden, and Canada) bear witness to similar policies of appropriation and disposition imposed on citizens’ bodies.