Enduring Shame A Recent History Of Unwed Pregnancy And Righteous Reproduction

A study of the rhetorical power of shame and its effect on reproductive politics Not long ago, unmarried pregnant women in the United States hid in maternity homes and relinquished their "illegitimate" children to more "deserving" two-parent families—all to conceal "shameful" pregnancies. Although times have changed, reproductive politics remain fraught. In Enduring Shame Heather Brook Adams recasts the 1960s and '70s—an era of presumed progress—as a time when expanding reproductive rights were paralleled by communicative practices of shame that cultivated increasingly public interventions into unwed and teen pregnancy and new forms of injustice. Drawing from personal interviews, archival documents, legal decisions, public policy, journalism, memoirs, and advocacy writing, Adams articulates how the rhetorical power of shame persuaded the American public to think about reproduction, sexual righteousness, and unwed pregnancy. Despite the aspirational goals of reproductive liberation, public sentiment frequently reflected supremacist beliefs regarding racial, economic, and moral fitness—notions that informed new public policy. Enduring Shame maps a range of experiences across these decades from women's experiences in homes for unwed mothers to policy and legal changes that are typically understood as proof of shame's dissipation, including Title IX legislation and Roe v. Wade. Rhetorical historiography and questions of reproductive justice guide the analysis, and women's testimonies provide essential perspectives and context. Through these histories, Adams articulates a network of language, affect, and embodiment through which shame moves; expands rhetorical understandings of the discursive power of the identities of woman and mother; and considers how the gendered, raced, and classed aspects of shame can help us understand and support reproductive dignity. Enduring Shame recovers a misunderstood part of women's recent history by considering why reproductive politics continue to be so volatile despite previous gains and why shame still figures centrally in discourse about women's reproductive and sexual freedoms.

Delves into the rhetorical work of elective single mothers (ESMs) in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries as they sought--and continue to seek--to legitimize their maternal identities and family formations Scholars of rhetoric have largely overlooked the inherent rhetoricity of family. In The Case for Single Motherhood, Katherine Mack posits family as a central concern of rhetorical studies by reflecting on how language is used by single mothers who seek to reenvision the personal, social, and political meanings of family. Drawing on intersectional and rhetorical theories, Mack demonstrates how the category of elective single motherhood emerged in response to the historically differential treatment of "unwed mothers" along racial and class lines. Through her readings of a range of self-sponsored ESM texts--guidebooks, memoirs, and interactive digital media written by and primarily for other ESMs--and from her perspective as an elective single mother herself, Mack evaluates the rhetorical power, as well as the exclusions and hierarchies, that the ESM label effects. She analyzes how ESMs envision motherhood, visions that entail their musings about who can and should mother. Ultimately, Mack offers women who are considering nonnormative paths to motherhood a way to affirm their maternal identities and paths without disparaging others'. Scholars in the fields of rhetoric and feminist rhetorical studies will find in this volume an illuminating perspective on the rhetorical power of self-sponsored texts in particular. Crafting a methodology to identify and evaluate the goals and effects of legitimacy work and selecting sources that bring academic attention to varied genres of self-sponsored writings, Mack paves the way for future rhetorical studies of motherhood and family.

This handbook offers a collection of scholarly essays that analyze questions of reproductive justice throughout its cultural representation in global literature and film. It offers analysis of specific texts carefully situated in their evolving historical, economic, and cultural contexts. Reproductive justice is taken beyond the American setting in which the theory and movement began; chapters apply concepts to international realities and literatures from different countries and cultures by covering diverse genres of cultural production, including film, television, YouTube documentaries, drama, short story, novel, memoir, and self-help literature. Each chapter analyzes texts from within the framework of reproductive justice in an interdisciplinary way, including English, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and German language, literature and culture, comparative literature, film, South Asian fiction, Canadian theatre, writing, gender studies, Deaf studies, disability studies, global health and medical humanities, and sociology. Academics, graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in Literature, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Motherhood Studies, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, the Medical Humanities, Reproductive Justice, and Human Rights are the main audience of the volume.

In an age in which women’s reproductive rights are increasingly under attack, a minister and ethicist offers a stirring argument that abortion can be a moral good Here’s a fact that we often ignore: unplanned pregnancy and abortion are a normal part of women’s reproductive lives. Roughly one-third of US women will have an abortion by age forty-five, and fifty to sixty percent of the women who have abortions were using birth control during the month they got pregnant. Yet women who have abortions are routinely shamed and judged, and safe and affordable access to abortion is under relentless assault, with the most devastating impact on poor women and women of color. Rebecca Todd Peters, a Presbyterian minister and social ethicist, argues that this shaming and judging reflects deep, often unspoken patriarchal and racist assumptions about women and women’s sexual activity. These assumptions are at the heart of what she calls the justification framework, which governs our public debate about abortion, and disrupts our ability to have authentic public discussions about the health and well-being of women and their families. Abortion, then, isn’t the social problem we should be focusing on. The problem is our inability to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents who must weigh the concrete moral question of what to do when they are pregnant or when there are problems during a pregnancy. Ambitious in method and scope, Trust Women skillfully interweaves political analysis, sociology, ancient and modern philosophy, Christian tradition, and medical history, and grounds its analysis in the material reality of women’s lives and their decisions about sexuality, abortion, and child-bearing. It ends with a powerful re-imagining of the moral contours of pre-natal life and suggests we recognize pregnancy as a time when a woman must assent, again and again, to an ethical relationship with the prenate.

Drawing on an international range of examples, from Che Guevarra to "The Crying Game," Profit and Pleasure leads the discussion of sexuality to a consideration of material reality and the substance of men and women's everyday lives.

In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe. Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.

Xing Lu examines language, art, persuasion, and argumentation in ancient China and offers a detailed and authentic account of ancient Chinese rhetorical theories and practices within the society's philosophical, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. She focuses on the works of five schools of thought and ten well-known Chinese thinkers from Confucius to Han Feizi to the the Later Mohists. Lu identifies seven key Chinese terms pertaining to speech, language, persuasion, and argumentation as they appeared in these original texts, selecting ming bian as the linchpin for the Chinese conceptual term of rhetorical studies. Lu compares Chinese rhetorical perspectives with those of the ancient Greeks, illustrating that the Greeks and the Chinese shared a view of rhetoric as an ethical enterprise and of speech as a rational and psychological activity. The two traditions differed, however, in their rhetorical education, sense of rationality, perceptions of the role of language, approach to the treatment and study of rhetoric, and expression of emotions. Lu also links ancient Chinese rhetorical perspectives with contemporary Chinese interpersonal and political communication behavior and offers suggestions for a multicultural rhetoric that recognizes both culturally specific and transcultural elements of human communication.