“Prendersi cura di se stesse”: riproduzione e sessualità in Messico. Governance riproduttiva e traiettorie di vita.

The thesis presents a study of family planning policies in Mexico, Merida, in the state of Yucatan. The family planning policies are analyzed from two major perspectives: on population intended as fertility control of the population and that of the sexual and reprodcutive right. Starting from the analysis of the "field of contraception," the thesis will be a critical study on the ways in which sexuality and reproduction are defined, negotiated and lived. Reproduction appears to be involved in a dynamic process, influenced by cultural mechanisms, social, political and material inscribed into "local moral worlds" (Kleinman, 1999; Das, 1998 e 1999), and at the same time, influenced by relationship, strategies and global models (Biehl – Petryna, 2013). The agents of the field examined during the research are varied: institutionals, economics, socials, and the individual subjects with their lives. This field of action, however, is not only expressed in the dynamics of power relations in which the effects of domain are total but never completely stable (Foucault, 1984). The field is also expressed in the production of a discourse that legitimizes and supports models, visions and individual choices. Reproduction and sexuality within my work are not considered only as intimate spheres of human inscribed in the order of social, but are analyzed in their public and institutional aspects. These categories are investigated, in the thesis, starting from the form in which they are physically held and processed on the level of discourse in state hospitals and other social spaces (Pro-Life and Pro-Choice movement).