Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Preguancy, Birth and Parenting

Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Preguancy, Birth and Parenting

Author: Nadya Burton

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1772580368

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Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting explores some of the ways in which reproductive experiences are taken up in the rich arena of cultural production. The chapters in this collection pose questions, unsettle assumptions, and generate broad imaginative spaces for thinking about representation of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. They demonstrate the ways in which practices of consuming and using representations carry within them the productive forces of creation. Bringing together an eclectic and vibrant range of perspectives, this collection offers readers the possibility to rethink and reimagine the diverse meanings and practices of representations of these significant life events. Engaging theoretical reflection and creative image making, the contributors explore a broad range of cultural signs with a focus on challenging authoritative representations in a manner that seeks to reveal rather than conceal the insistently problematic and contestable nature of image culture. Natal Signs gathers an exciting set of critically engaged voices to reflect on some of life’s most meaningful moments in ways that affirm natality as the renewed promise of possibility.


Natal Signs

Natal Signs

Author: Nadya Burton

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781926452326

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"Representations of pregnancy, birth and early parenting are simultaneously diverse (grounded in different social, religious and cultural contexts), and normative (they tend to reflect the status quo and romanticized notions of these profound life events). This collection explores diverse cultural representations of childbirth and related life events with a focus on exploring and unsettling normative and stereotypical representations. The work included seeks to engage representations that challenge, transgress and resist cultural norms."--


My Body, Their Baby

My Body, Their Baby

Author: Grace Kao

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1503635988

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Drawing on her own experience as a surrogate mother, Grace Y. Kao assesses the ethics of surrogacy from a feminist and progressive Christian perspective, concluding that certain kinds of surrogacy arrangements can be morally permissible—and should even be embraced. While the use of assisted reproductive technology has brought joy to countless families, surrogacy remains the most controversial path to parenthood. My Body, Their Baby helps readers sort through objections to this way of bringing children into the world. Candidly reflecting on carrying a baby for her childless friends and informed by the reproductive justice framework developed by women of color activists, Kao highlights the importance of experience in feminist methodology and Christian ethics. She shows what surrogacy is like from the perspective of women becoming pregnant for others, parents who have opted for surrogacy (including queer couples), and the surrogate-born children themselves. Developing a constructive framework of ethical norms and principles to guide the formation of surrogacy relationships, Kao ultimately offers a vision for surrogacy that celebrates the reproductive generosity and solidarity displayed through the sharing of traditionally maternal roles.


Inclusive Aims

Inclusive Aims

Author: Heather Brook Adams

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2024-03-02

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1643174258

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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.


Pregnancy, Delivery, Childbirth

Pregnancy, Delivery, Childbirth

Author: Nadia Filippini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0429560478

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This book reconstructs the history of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in Europe from antiquity to the 20th century, focusing on its most significant turning points: the emergence of a medical-scientific approach to delivery in Ancient Greece, the impact of Christianity, the establishment of the man-midwife in the 18th century, the medicalisation of childbirth, the emergence of a new representation of the foetus as "unborn citizen", and, finally, the revolution of reproductive technologies. The book explores a history that, far from being linear, progressive or homogeneous, is characterised by significant continuities as well as transformations. The ways in which a woman gives birth and lives her pregnancy and the postpartum period are the result of a complex series of factors. The book therefore places these events in their wider cultural, social and religious contexts, which influenced the forms taken by rituals and therapeutic practices, religious and civil prescriptions and the regulation of the female body. The investigation of this complex experience represents a crucial contribution to cultural, social and gender history, as well as an indispensable tool for understanding today’s reality. It will be of great use to undergraduates studying the history of childbirth, the history of medicine, the history of the body, as well as women's and gender history more broadly.


Mothers as Keepers and Tellers of Origin Stories

Mothers as Keepers and Tellers of Origin Stories

Author: Kerri S. Kearney

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1772582883

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This collection presents diverse critical perspectives and discussion about the keeping or telling of children’s originstories as a part of contemporary mothering labor. The first two sections outline perspectives from mother authors about how they strategically craft complex origin stories for their child(ren), as well as how the telling and retelling of origin stories may be passed on as generational knowledge. The third section discusses mothering and origin stories from multiple perspectives: that of a father by adoption, of single mothers positioning stories of absent fathers, and a multi-perspective chapter that includes a mother by adoption, her adult child, and her child’s birthmother.


Imagery, Ritual, and Birth

Imagery, Ritual, and Birth

Author: Anna M. Hennessey

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-12-11

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1498548741

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Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. Yet the topic of birth remains deeply underrepresented in the humanities, overshadowed by a scholarly focus on death. This book explores how imagery is used ritualistically in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture. Objects central to the book’s study include religious figurines, paintings about birth, and other items representative of pregnancy, crowning, or giving birth that have an historical or original meaning connected to religion. Contemporaryartists are also creating new art in which they represent birth and mothering as nonreligious events that are sacred or divine. Framed through the concept of social ontology, which examines the nature of the social world and studies how people create meaning out of the various objects, images, and processes that make up human social life, the book theorizes a social ontology of birth, focusing on how the meaning of imagery undergoes metamorphosis between the spheres of religion, secularity, nonreligion, and the sacred when used during birth as a rite of passage. Included in the study are more than thirty images of birth, some of which have never been written about before.


Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment

Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment

Author: Alys Einion

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1772582018

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The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.


Trans Reproductive and Sexual Health

Trans Reproductive and Sexual Health

Author: Damien W. Riggs

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-22

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1000813053

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Focusing on reproductive and sexual justice, this important book explores in detail both the challenges that trans people face when negotiating reproductive and sexual health in restrictive social contexts, and their agency in advocating for change. Chapters cover a breadth of topics such as intimacy, sexual violence, reproductive intentions, sexuality education, oncology, and pregnancy, introducing readers to the latest research in the field as well as key emerging concepts. The authors identify core principles for trans reproductive and sexual justice, providing a broad overview of what is currently succeeding and what can be built on going into the future. Trans Reproductive and Sexual Health offers a comprehensive exploration that is essential reading for academics and students in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and related areas, as well as clinicians and policy makers, offering direct implications for professional audiences working in health and social care.