The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature

by Beth Widmaier Capo (Editor), Laura Lazzari (Editor)

Overview

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 healthand 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030995324
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	09/11/2022
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	667
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Beth Widmaier Capo is Edward Capps Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Illinois College, USA. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, USA. She is the author of Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction (2007) and co-edited Reproductive Rights Issues in Popular Media: International Perspectives (2017).

Laura Lazzari holds a Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and a Master of Studies from Oxford, UK. A scholar in Motherhood Studies, she works at the Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical Humanities, Switzerland. She was the recipient of a 2015-2016 AAUW International Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University, USA, and has lectured for several universities in Switzerland and the United States.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Recognizing Issues of Reproductive Justice in Nineteenth-Century US Literature.- 3. “Learn and Run”: Reproductive Oppression and Resistance in the Works of Octavia E. Butler.- 4. Reading Reproductive Justice through Toni Morrison.- 5. Reproductive Justice in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf”.- 6. Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice in Recent German-Language Fiction and Film.- 7. Cultivating Access, Cultivating Ignorance: A Survey of Herbal Abortifacients in American Fiction.- 8. Female Narratives of Abortion in Italian Literature From the 1970s to the Present.- 9. Re-Presenting the Un-Presentable: Annie Ernaux’s L’évènement and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and Two Days.- 10. Re-conceiving the World: Dystopia and Reproductive Justice.- 11. Reproductive and Disability Justice: Deaf Peoples’ Right to be Born.- 12. Queer Argonauts for Reproductive Justice.- 13. On the One-Child Policy of China: Reading Ma Jian’s Novel The Dark Road.- 14. Pregnancy Self-Help Literature as Disembodiment: An Issue of Reproductive Justice.- 15. Birthing Bodies Delivering Power in Anglophone Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.- 16. Writing and Birthing on Country: Examining Indigenous Australian Birth Stories from a Reproductive Justice Lens.- 17. Reproductive Experiences of Poor Mothers in India: An Analysis of YouTube Documentaries.- 18. Spain and Structural Infertility: Towards an Integrative Vision of Motherhood in the Novel Quién quiere ser madre by Silvia Nanclares.- 19. “Give me children, or else I die”: Baby-hunger, Surrogacy, and Family-Making by Any Means Necessary.- 20. Surrogacy or Sale: Reflecting upon Reproductive Justice through The House for Hidden Mothers and A House of Happy Mothers.- 21. Claiming Motherhood: Reproductive Justice andSurrogacy in Chinese American Literature of the New Millennium.- 22. Reimagining the Past, Present, and the Future of Reproductive Bodies in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction: Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World.- 23. State Terror and the Destruction of Families for Reproductive “Management” in Three Argentine Films.- 24. Scroungers, Strivers, and Single Mothers: Reproductive Justice and the British Welfare State in Ken Loach’s Social Realism.- 25. Reproductive Justice in Undocumented Women’s Memoirs.- 26. Challenging Racialized Motherhood and the Sixties Scoop with Indigenous Theatre.- 27. “I’ll Never Be Ready!”: Applying a Reproductive Justice Lens in the Lower-Division Literature Classroom.- 28. Teaching Reproductive Justice: Reading Motherhood with Generations X, Y, and Z.- 29. Mayday: Rethinking Reproductive Justice Protests Utilizing Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.- 30. Not an Easy Read for “Normal” “Colored” People: Conversations on Shange’s and Rooney’s Literatures of Sexual Citizenship.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This timely and original edited volume intervenes between the fields of reproductive justice (RJ) and literary studies to redress the absence of scholarship that considers what literature might have to say about reproductive (in)justice and what the impact of reproductive politics on literary production has been.” (Mary Thompson, Professor of English and Coordinator of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, James Madison University, USA)

“This collection is an impressive and timely contribution to the study of reproductive justice. Wide-ranging in theoretical approaches and inclusive of many kinds of texts from multiple nations, languages and periods, these essays constitute essential reading for any literary or cultural studies scholar interested in reproductive rights or their abrogation. The volume’s lens of reproductive justice effectively brings into focus representations of both the oppressive, such as eugenics, and the liberatory, such as reproductive autonomy.” (Daylanne K. English, Professor of English, Macalester College, USA)

“As the first collection of literary scholarship focusing on reproductive justice, this handbook is an innovative, vital, and essential contribution to contemporary feminist theory and activism on reproductive justice. In taking up and applying reproductive justice as a lens to analyze literary and cultural productions across many genres and from diverse perspectives, the handbook yields startlingly new and necessary insights in order to enrich and extend the conversation on the possibilities of reproductive justice.” (Andrea O’Reilly, Professor at the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, York University, Canada, author of Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (2021), and editor of Maternal Theory: The Essential Readings (2021))