Reproducing Empire is an invitation to reconceptualize gender, sex, and reproduction as an analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rico. In this complex and multivalent work, Laura Briggs repositions ideologies of family, sexuality, and reproduction as central to U.S. imperial enterprises. In so doing, she focuses a powerful lens on how discourses of sex, science, race, reproduction, deviance, and domesticity have shaped and propelled U.S. colonialism, in both form and substance.

Moving from the 1890s through the 1970s, Briggs' ambitious work demonstrates how American institutions and government agencies have long been concerned with the purportedly deviant sexuality of low-income Puerto Rican women on the island and the U.S. mainland. She chronicles how this interest was manifest through the construction of an array of “social problems” that came to undergird and justify the American colonialist project in Puerto Rico. Thus, Briggs traces how popular notions of the dangerous, diseased prostitute and the allegedly dysfunctional structure of impoverished Puerto Rican families became essential to American intervention in the region. She also examines tropical medicine as an imperial science and its use in the construction of racialized bodies based on geography. Briggs goes on to reveal how the complicated politics and discourses surrounding overpopulation, reproduction and sexuality—as organized through debates over eugenics and birth control—operated as a dominant narrative for class and nationalist struggles.

Briggs' analysis, however, is not limited to the geographic boundaries of Puerto Rico, and she follows the post-war migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland, specifically to New York City. Here, Briggs charts how theories of race, gender, and class, as articulated through the social sciences, became the primary staging ground for struggles over welfare policy and anti-poverty initiatives in New York and the nation as a whole. By linking the ascendance of “culture of poverty” theories to the ways in which ideas of Puerto Rican women's sexuality and reproduction had been unremittingly narrated as deviant, Briggs demonstrates how federal social welfare policies operated as powerful media for social control, while concomitantly creating a new framework within which activists could structure and sustain strategies of resistance.

Throughout her book, Briggs brings into relief how these thorny issues were presented through rhetorics of gender and race, by a host of social actors including feminists, the U.S. military, philanthropists, nationalists, missionaries, the federal government, and natural and social scientists. While their specific interests in these “social problems” differed, their involvement enabled and legitimized each entity's institutional claim to power and allowed them to play off each other as foils, whether in concert or opposition. Ultimately, they worked out their larger policy prescriptions on the bodies of Puerto Rican women.

While Briggs provides valuable insight into the material circumstances of working class Puerto Rican women and the ways in which their lives became fodder for the agendas of so many, she consciously leaves their voices out of her study. Working within subaltern studies, Briggs questions the utility of requiring the oppressed to “speak for themselves” and justifies her decision by arguing that such efforts often act as a methodological subterfuge for the researcher's own analytical and ideological proclivities, while simultaneously functioning as a form of intellectual dishonesty that occludes the politics inherent in the production of knowledge. However, in light of the fact that she allows so many of her subjects to speak for themselves, the silence left by the absence of these women's stories is deafening. Although Briggs anticipates this criticism and addresses it at length in the book's epilogue, her effort to avoid provoking “pity, outrage or contempt in order to further one or another agenda in relation to the island,” has all but reduced these women to the characters painted by those she has allowed to speak in the book.

Reproducing Empire is a significant work that makes an important contribution to American and Latin American Studies, politics, history, and gender studies. It not only challenges readers' assumptions about the relationship between culture, race, gender, and the state, but also presents a larger context for understanding contemporary processes of globalization, imperialism, and citizenship.