A Culturally Centered and Intersectional Approach to Reproductive Justice

This book focuses on reproductive justice through a culturally-centered and intersectional lens. The autoethnographic nature of each chapter allows contributors to unpack issues surrounding reproductive justice from their perspectives and allows readers to look towards understanding the issue from a personal and structural level.

A Culturally-Centered and Intersectional Approach to Reproductive Justice investigates and challenges assumptions and pre-existing notions regarding reproductive justice by grounding this work in a more inclusive and culturally informed context. Throughout history, contributors argue, reproductive justice movements have centered white, cisgendered, and non-disabled women in the West. Along with women in the Global South being underrepresented in scholarship, research tends to focus only on the abuses they have suffered, rather than delving deeper into issues of structures, barriers, or agency. Each chapter is written from an autoethnographic perspective to unpack the contributors’ challenges with achieving reproductive justice for themselves and their respective communities. Ultimately, this book asserts that when different facets of reproductive justice are presented in the form of narrative self-reflexivity, readers find a space to safely evaluate their positionality within the larger reproductive justice movement while simultaneously acknowledging the complexity of the movement itself. Scholars of communication, health, and women’s and gender studies will find this book of particular interest.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Tomeka M. Robinson, Sabrina Singh, and Christina Mary Joseph

Chapter 2: Promoting a “Domestic Supply of Infants”: The Dangers of Commodifying Reproduction in the United States

McKenzie Twine

Chapter 3: Whiteness as an Obstacle to Reproductive Justice

Lisa DeTora

Chapter 4: Co-scripted Autoethnographies of (Re)thinking the Current Reproductive Justice Discourse in the United States

Breonna Riddick; Satveer Kaur-Gill, and Iccha Basnayat

Chapter 5: Barely Made it Out Alive

Aisha Wilson-Carter

Chapter 6: The Experience of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Treatment and the Need for Health Education

Cinthia Lopes da Silva and Lília Aparecida Kanan

Chapter 7: Making it through the Maze: Navigating Barriers for Transgender Women to Become Parents

Riley D. Campbell

Chapter 8: Intersectional Rhetorics of Justice in Parenting Practices

Diana Isabel Martínez and Amy Garcia

Chapter 9: Day In, Day Out: Fighting for Abortion Access in the American South

Calla Hales

Chapter 10: Evaluating the Value of Doula Advocacy in Mitigating Negative Birth and Health Outcomes

Christina Mary Joseph

About the Contributors