"therefore centers pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing practices as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, the imperial and Jamaican governments, and enslaved people competed to control and regulate biological reproduction and determine who benefited from its rewards."

Turner explores how abolitionists perceived and represented young black female bodies and how they legitimized and sought to extend colonial rule and the benefits it generated to the metropole by controlling women's reproductive lives. Turner's theory is the physical body can be used to examine many aspects of nature, society, etc.

I loved that she used the body as a conceptual frame for the thesis. A body approach does 4 things.
1. The Body approach allows representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, social relations, cultural ideals and expressions, body's abilities and disabilities.
2. The body approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, treatment, care etc. Recognizes that the material body is an entity susceptible to illness, infertility and death.
3. The body approach is concerned with understanding ideas about how the body determines people's lived experiences.
4. The body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labour > and requires scholars to examine the organization of lives and labour according to bodily functions and meanings given to them.

Originally I thought this was going to be more of a 'bottom-up" book. It is not. BUT it is still a fantastic book. Turner looks at the actions of both the enslaved and the slaveholder/abolitionist/colonial official. The focus on abolitionists made me re-think the classic narrative that abolitionists wanted slavery gone for moral reasons ((which was not always (probably not even the majority of the reason) true). Turner examines the abolitionist paradox of saving hapless victims of the slave trade while ensuring the sugar plantations had their productivity.

The study is also concerned with how enslaved people contested medical, gendered, and parental ideals foisted upon them. By controlling childbearing practices enslaved women had brief access to power that temporarily dominated gender order. Turner illustrates how central pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing were to the abolition of slavery, reorganizing plantation work, discipline and care of slaves, and fashioning of resistance, social life, and culture among the enslaved. I think THAT was the most fascinating aspect of it all for me. How the abolition of slavery caused a shift in regards to reproduction. It went from importing workers to needing to cultivate new workers to wanting to create good little citizens. Planters reformed plantation life according to the capital's needs and White power. Chef's kiss to Turner's work!!