patriarchy seeks to control women’s bodies and opportunities around sexuality, parenting, and even labor based on presumptions about the female reproductive body. Many scholars assert that the State is essentially patriarchal, producing and reifying structures of inequality that rely on binary, essentialist, and hierarchical constructions of sex and gender (see Connell 1990; Eisenstein 1981; Haney 2000). In the patriarchal State, they argue, sexuality, and particularly women’s sexuality, is regulated by the State through its policies, laws, and allocation of resources, and reproduction becomes
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