This dissertation offers an account of conspicuous performance as reproductive justice activism. Reproductive justice scholarship and activism disrupt dominant discursive frameworks of reproductive health and rights to emphasize the intersectionality and interdependence of oppressive systems that limit reproductive freedom. Reproductive justice scholar-activists turn to aesthetic communication practices, such as storytelling, as a strategy for challenging reproductive oppression. As a practice of public and scholarly aesthetic communication, performance studies provides a unique methodological approach for practicing reproductive justice. To demonstrate this argument, I trace a history of performance scholar-activists engaging reproductive politics through conspicuous performance. While this history stretches across the performance studies discipline, I locate the Marion Kleinau Theatre at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as a case study to examine the breadth and depth of reproductive justice performance in a particular performance space. Using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological archival methods, I assemble an archive of reproductive politics in Kleinau Theatre performances organized around the three primary principles of reproductive justice: the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to safe and sustainable communities. By attending to the reproductive politics in performance acts, I highlight the reproductive politics of performance acts—or how performance is discursively framed through the language of reproduction. Ultimately, I advocate for queering performance archives to disrupt this repro-normativity, approaching them instead through reproductive justice concepts of access, pleasure, and memorial.

The purpose of this feminist action research project was to produce a practical support volunteer training and manual for the Georgia Reproductive Justice Access Network (GRJAN). Founded in 2011, GRJAN is a grassroots, reproductive justice abortion fund that provides abortion funding and until 2012, practical support (lodging, transportation, and childcare) to low-income individuals seeking abortion services in Atlanta, GA. The resultant thesis is a reflective essay upon the project, documenting and analyzing the successes and failures of the project as well as discussing the limitations of pursuing feminist activist work within the academy.

This dissertation is an investigation of doulas as agents of social change through the lens of feminist theory. Doulas are nonmedical health care workers who provide physical, emotional, and informational support during pregnancy, childbirth, and/or the postpartum period. Because of doulas' willingness to work within the structures of the hospital setting, some have questioned the effectiveness of doulas as change-makers. While much feminist scholarship on the politics of birth centralizes the issue of medicalization, I demonstrate that expanding this line of analysis aids in better understanding the cultural impact of doula care as part of a larger picture of reproductive health advocacy. Through discourse analysis, participant observation, face-to-face ethnographic interviews, and online surveys, I track the goals and effects doulas ascribe to their work, both activist and professional, and on both an individual and group level. Rather than asking whether doulas can successfully challenge the medicalization of birth, I seek to understand how the doula movement contributes to social justice through challenging various overlapping axes of inequality, related to race, class, gender, and sexuality. This analysis highlights the work of doulas in marginalized communities that is, as yet, under-researched and under-appreciated, while also illuminating the multifaceted effects of the dominant medical model of birth. I observe that doulas are increasingly working to empower people in multiple facets of their lives, beyond the birthing room. Rather than being incapable of, or uninterested in, creating social change, doulas are increasingly bringing a new political consciousness into birth work, as evidenced by the emerging designations of "radical doula" and "full spectrum doula." I argue that this movement among doulas represents a new paradigm in birthing rights activism, which connects childbirth choices to a larger reproductive justice agenda and forges connections between birthworkers and activists for causes such as LGBT rights, abortion rights, prisoners' rights, and economic and racial justice. By reimagining the reach of their work, many doulas are drawing necessary connections to social justice issues that are often overlooked in the childbirth reform movement, which tends to focus on medicalization as the primary issue.

Purvi Patel is an Indian American woman who, in 2015, was the first U.S. citizen to be convicted under feticide statutes for allegedly attempting her own abortion. Though her 2015 conviction was overturned the same year, the feticide conviction was significant as a legal precedent as well as part of a larger trend criminalizing pregnant women of color. With an eye towards the greater pattern of the criminalization of other pregnant women of color (Boyd, 1999; Faludi, 1991; Humphries, 1999; Mahan, 1996; Roberts, 1997), in this thesis I employ a feminist legal studies methodology and the theoretical frameworks of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) and Reproductive Justice (Ross and Solinger, 2017; Silliman et al., 2004) to analyze five pro-Patel briefs, two from Patel’s appellate lawyers and three from amici curiae. The four themes present are: fetal personhood; racialized gender; medical privacy and trust; and surveillance, knowledge, and legitimacy. I argue these briefs were not always consistent with the tenets of intersectionality and Reproductive Justice, even as the briefs may have been effective in convincing the Court of Appeals to overturn Patel’s conviction. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of Patel’s case for public health and law. I suggest that criminalization of abortion is harmful to public health and that the feticide mandate as it stands now does not do what it was intended to do, which is to protect the pregnant woman from harm.

This dissertation analyzes the political and expert discourses behind the legalization of abortion from the first attempt to decriminalize it in 1920 when democratic Czechoslovakia was established to 1986 when the institution of abortion commissions was banned during socialism. Drawing on biopolitical theories and critical feminist and disability studies that problematize the liberal understanding of rights, choice and autonomy, I shed a new light on reproduction policies by drawing parallels between the socialist and democratic regimes. Instead of assuming the mutual exclusiveness of the two systems, my inquiry starts from a different position and destabilizes the boundaries between East and West, active and passive, liberal and totalitarian. My main research question explores what sustains the continuity of the 1986 law, which allowed abortion on demand, in the new post-1989 capitalist and allegedly more democratic system. The aim is not to answer why the law was enacted, but rather what it unleashes in terms of citizenship practices. Through a geneaological intersectional lens, I go back in Czechoslovak history and follow the simultaneous paths of women’s liberation from a patriarchal order of things and their subjection to the ableist desire to achieve a nation full of strong and capable citizens. I deconstruct how the ideal female citizen-subject – the white, bourgeois, healthy, well-off modern woman of reason who individually plans her reproduction and has children only when and if she can – was constructed throughout the different historical discourses; and with what effects for the “other” categories of women – the poor, young, old, sick, the disabled, ethnically different. I argue that from their onset abortion rights were conceptualized as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by redefining women’s responsibilities as mothers who were to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment. I am thus concerned with a certain type of biopolitical rationality, which defied tradition and religion and started to fear the degeneration of a collective more than its depopulation. Hence not every pregnancy was desirable, especially when seen as a threat to women’s or children’s health. I identify three stages of this epistemological shift when women’s health and sexuality collided into law and children’s health: its building efforts after WWI, developing spasms after WWII and functioning as a normalized structure of recognition from the 1960s onward. I demonstrate how eugenics trespassed into population politics and together with planned parenthood created a complex system of socio-biological classes of (un)desirability, determining who should belong to the nation, who should reproduce, whose life is worth living, loving and thus worth of protection. By elaborating on what I have termed female biological citizenship – that women function as civilizational identifiers and (self-)regulators of the quality and health of the nation, I suggest they are never free in regard to reproduction regardless of the political system. I conclude that this focus on the biological erases the distinction between socialism and capitalism, integrating women’s will as a governing tool to achieve societal progress.

Free-standing birth centres (FSBCs) were formed in Ontario in 2014 and operate with the support of birth centre aides (BCAs), a novel birth worker role. As a recent introduction to the Ontario maternity care system, there have been no academic inquiries into BCAs and only a hand full of investigations on birth centres (Mattison, 2015; Mattison et al., 2020; Murray-Davis et al., 2014; Sprague et al., 2018). From a feminist perspective, an analysis of the BCA role offers a unique opportunity to conduct a feminist analysis of work in healthcare between largely women care providers (i.e., midwives and BCAs), leadership, and reproductive justice activism. My dissertation consists of three standalone papers based on empirical data gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews and document analysis at the Ottawa Birth and Wellness Centre (OBWC). For my first paper, “Mapping the Development of Birth Centre Aides at the Ottawa Birth and Wellness Centre”, I applied a feminist sociology of professions framework (Davies, 1996; Witz, 1992) and employed an institutional ethnographic methodology (Smith, 1990) to understand how the BCA role was developed and operationalized in the OBWC. I mapped the development of the BCA role at the OBWC descriptively and visually using the documentary and interview data with key stakeholders from the OBWC (n=16), including BCAs, administrators, and midwives. In the second paper, “Feminist Leadership in Healthcare: The Case of Birth Centre Aides and the Ottawa Birth and Wellness Centre,” I integrated Tronto’s (1993) ethic of care with Dickson and Tholl’s (2014) LEADS in a Caring Environment leadership framework in an instrumental case study (Stake, 2005) to understand how BCAs lead from their position within the OBWC and how they experience feminist leadership practices in the OBWC. Finally, in my third paper, “Birth Work as Reproductive Activism: The Case of Birth Centre Aides at the Ottawa Birth and Wellness Centre,” I applied a reproductive justice theoretical framework (Ross, 2017; SisterSong, 2015) through an instrumental case study (Stake, 2005) to understand how BCAs undertake quiet reproductive activism at the OBWC. Taken together, my dissertation offers new knowledge on the role and development of BCAs in the OBWC and contributes to advancing feminist scholarship on healthcare leadership and reproductive justice activism.

No description available.

This dissertation seeks to rhetorically examine how women who have had abortions construct their abortion experience, with particular attention given to the role of various identity factors (such as race, nationality, class, spirituality, and geographic location) in the construction of their experiences. By giving voice to women's experiences and placing this voice in a historical context of differential racialization, as well as within both Critical Race Feminism (CRF) and Reproductive Justice (RJ) frameworks, this dissertation asks: How does the narrator construct the importance of her identity in her abortion and reproductive health services experiences?; Does the narrator link previous reproductive health services issues, such as sex education or cost of birth control, to her abortion experiences?; Does the narrator link her abortion experience to larger social structures and power issues?; How does the narrator construct her experience of abortion? What emotional elements does she present in her construction of the narrative?; How does the narrator construct her experience of deciding to have an abortion?; How does the narrator construct the role of her social support system in her abortion experience?; and How does the narrator reflect on her abortion experience? This dissertation argues that while women experience and construct abortion in very different ways, common experiential themes emerge. While women do not all construct or reflect upon their abortion experiences in the same way, narrative themes emerge that fade in and out of focus based on a woman's standpoint and the various aspects and intersections of her identity. In light of the emergent themes, this dissertation suggests enhanced opportunities for the sharing of women's abortion experiences, as well as more academic and activist work to examine and raise public awareness about issues of power and privilege in the abortion process.

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not the mainstream reproductive rights organization Planned Parenthood of the Atlanta Area (PPAA) considered reproductive justice issues typically advocated for by non-traditional reproductive rights organizations. Methods. This research was a qualitative content analysis of discourse internal to PPAA (meeting minutes) and discourse communicated to the public externally via print media channels. Results. A total of 105 documents were analyzed as part of this study: 57 meeting minutes and 48 press clippings. The analysis revealed that, internally, PPAA did consider reproductive justice issues but that this was not directly communicated to the public via print media channels. Most noticeably, press characterizations of PPAA were slanted too heavily on the organization’s proliferation of population control as a goal and did not give enough consideration to its consideration of racial diversity.

During the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the fear of being denounced and subsequently punished contributed to the social silence that became the norm during Franco´s dictatorship. This was then reinforced during democracy through an implicit pact of oblivion. After the death of Franco, as an attempt to avoid reopening wounds, successive democratic governments decided not to agitate the ghost of the civil war, due to its traumatic nature. The consequence of such a pact of oblivion is the lack of information about the past, continually suffered by subsequent generations. Furthermore, Francoism legally imposed the subordination of women to men in all spheres of life, denying the most basic rights to women as well as their autonomy as individuals. This political and gendered repression resulted in a lack of agency and reinforcement of a patriarchal structure. Memory Studies has assumed major importance due to the memory boom that has affected Spain since the end of the twentieth century. Twenty-first century literature offers new representations of women which need to be fully studied. This dissertation analyzes four novels that describe, question and expand on different roles for women during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its aftermath from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main theoretical concepts through which the novels/themes are examined include intersections of gender and power, intersectionality, gendered empowerment, identity, victimization, agency, genocide, gendered punishments, and the deconstruction of the normative gender role through the re-signification of domestic chores. In the selected literary works, female characters are depicted in uncommon scenarios, such as prisons, anti-Francoist guerrilla, exile, and also on the winning Francoist side. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks including sociology, literature, and history, my analysis reveals the silenced story of the defeated and its repercussions in the democratic Spain of today.