Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric's Role in Reproductive Justice

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms

Series Editors: Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan

INCLUSIVE AIMS: RHETORIC'S ROLE IN REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE engages with fraught reproductive realities-past, present, and future-and offers analysis and advice for coalitional alliance and strategy building. For those who legitimately value the needs, desires, and safety of reproducing people, recent years have demonstrated that in the United States especially, reproductive matters represent not only contestation but extreme precarity. Considering such pressing exigencies, those pursuing just reproductive politics can benefit from thinking about such events and actions rhetorically, and not in isolation but as interconnected and connected to larger webs of action. The collection features a range of activist-scholars and scholar-activists, each of whom shares and/or interrogates stories of reproductive in/justice. Its topics range from discourse practices related to telehealth, birthing doula care, and negligence due to systemic racism and transphobia to representations of vasectomy, strategies for political solidarity, and considerations for navigating the challenges of activist interventions. The project mindfully infuses insights from thought-traditions of reproductive justice activists and scholars outside of rhetoric. Through its varied chapters, the collection demonstrates how rhetorics of reproductive politics function as a means by which various injustices are illuminated and addressed.

Contributors include Zachary Beare, Fabiola Carrión, Hannah Dudley-Shotwell, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Meta Henty, Adele N. Nichols, Sheri Rysdam, Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Michelle C. Smith, Melissa Stone, Jill Swiencicki, Jenna Vinson, and James D. Warwood.

Heather Brook Adams is an associate professor of English and a cross-appointed faculty member in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, advocacy and argumentation, and feminist pedagogy. Nancy Myers is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she teaches rhetorical theory and history, composition, and linguistics and is cross-appointed faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.