Beyond Silence: Body Mapping and the Study of Coercive Intrauterine Device (IUD) Insertion

This article makes a methodological case for body mapping as a way of studying coercive reproductive intervention that is remembered rather than observed, that sits decades in the past, and that is held in the body more readily than it is put into words. It emerges from a larger study of Chinese women’s career experiences under the three-child policy. A recurring pattern emerged during fieldwork: participants’ discussions of contemporary employment regularly returned to embodied memories of forced intrauterine device insertion under the one-child policy era, generating a methodological and epistemological challenge. How can qualitative researchers engage with coercive reproductive histories when participants speak decades after the event, memory is fragmented, and the topic sits at the intersection of pain, shame, and state policy? Drawing on a sub-sample of 28 participants who completed body maps in follow-up interviews, this article argues that body mapping is especially suited to studying reproductive intervention as an ‘embodied afterlife’ that continues to shape women’s present decisions about work, fertility, and the future. Grounded in theories of reproductive governance, body memory, and sociological embodiment, the article makes three methodological contributions: body mapping reaches registers of experience that transcript-centred methods cannot fully access; in sequence with interviewing, it reshapes rather than simply supplements the analysis; and the analytic work of treating body maps as data, together with the ethical and relational demands of trauma-informed practice, is not a procedural addition to the method but part of what enables it to generate the knowledge it does.