I am a Latin American anthropologist, currently a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, where I previously held a lectureship. I am broadly interested in exploring the multifaceted ways coloniality manifests in the lives of peasant indigenous women. I analyse reproductive violence and toxic environmental exposures in extractive zones, with a focus on indigenous peasant worldviews as a challenge to dominant frameworks about reproduction, liveable futures, and environmental health, advancing decolonial theoretical approaches. I have also great interest in the ethical challenges of feminist ethnography and the incorporation of participatory methodologies like body-mapping.
My first manuscript, Decolonizing Reproductive Rights in Latin America (under contract with Bristol University Press), investigates the aftermath of reproductive violence in Peru under the state-mandated reproductive health and family planning program (1996-2000). The book examines the contradictions inherent in a policy aimed at empowering women to take control of their reproductive lives, yet simultaneously facilitating nationwide sterilization efforts. Through the voices of indigenous peasant women, I explore the embodied impacts of reproductive violence—manifested as physical debilitation and described as ‘alteraciones’—that challenge conventional frameworks of reproductive rights.
My current research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, explores how industrial mining in Northern Peru shaped indigenous peasant communities’ reproductive live, linking human, animal, and soil fertility into what I term ‘Reproductive Extractivism.’ Under this framework I theorize reproduction in a multi-species dimension that expands our understanding of reproduction beyond the narrow model of the individual and biological human reproductive cycle.
Selected Publications:
Chaparro-Buitrago, Julieta. 2024. Sterilizing Body-Territories: Understanding Contemporary Cases of Forced Sterilization in the United States and China. Feminist Anthropology. http://tinyurl.com/3tj23mms
Chaparro-Buitrago, Julieta & Cordelia Freeman. 2023. Reproductive Justice and the Figure of the Child: The Multiple Harms of Forced Sterilization and Abortion in Peru. Feminist Anthropology. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fea2.12124
Dow, Katherine & Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago. 2023. Toward Environmental Reproductive Justice. Van Hollen, Cecilia, and Nayantara Sheoran Appleton (eds). Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology. Wiley Blackwell (Invited Chapter)
Chaparro- Buitrago, Julieta. 2022. Debilitated Lifeworlds: Women’s Narratives of Forced Sterilization and the Limits of Reproductive Rights. Medical Anthropology Quarterly https://tinyurl.com/Debilitated-Lifeworlds *Top cited paper in MAQ between January 1st 2022 and December 31st 2023
Chaparro-Buitrago, Julieta. 2019. “Masters of their own Destiny: Women’s Rights and Forced Sterilization in Peru” Roy, M & Thompson, M (eds) The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism. Ohio State University Press
Photo Credit: Ümit Taner