The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature

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.

1.     Beth Widmaier Capo and Laura Lazzari, Introduction: Reproductive Justice in Literature and Culture

I. Reproductive Justice

3.     Anna Hinton, “Learn and Run”: Reproductive Oppression and Resistance in the Works of Octavia E. Butler

4.     Beth Widmaier Capo, Reading Reproductive Justice through Toni Morrison

6.     Waltraud Maierhofer, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice in Recent German-Language Fiction and Film

II. The right not to have a child

7.     Jeannette Schollaert, Cultivating Access, Cultivating Ignorance: A Survey of Herbal Abortifacients in American Fiction

8.     Giulia Po DeLisle, Female Narratives of Abortion in Italian Literature From the 1970s to the Present

9.     Victoria Tomasulo, Re-Presenting the Un-Presentable: Annie Ernaux’s L’évènement and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and Two Days

10.  Eir-Anne E. Edgar, Re-conceiving the World: Dystopia and Reproductive Justice

III. The right to have a child

Social, Cultural and Political Constraints

11.  Rachel Mazique, Tiffany L. Panko, and Jess A. Cuculick, Reproductive and Disability Justice: Deaf Peoples’ Right to be Born

12.  Mary C. Foltz, Queer Argonauts for Reproductive Justice

13.  Howard Y. F. Choy, On the One-Child Policy of China: Reading Ma Jian’s Novel The Dark Road

Pregnancy and Birth

14.  Pam Rutherford and Jill M. Wood, Pregnancy Self-Help Literature as Disembodiment: An Issue of Reproductive Justice

15.  Jeanne Clourec Gaboriau, Birthing Bodies Delivering Power in Anglophone Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

16.  Alexus Davis, Writing and Birthing on Country: Examining Indigenous Australian Birth Stories from a Reproductive Justice Lens

17.  Sucharita Sarkar, Reproductive Experiences of Poor Mothers in India: An Analysis of YouTube Documentaries

Infertility, surrogacy, and adoption

18.  María Reyes Ferrer, Spain and Structural Infertility: Towards an Integrative Vision of Motherhood in the Novel Quién quiere ser madre by Silvia Nanclares

20.  Soumya Kashyap and Priyanka Tripathi, Surrogacy or Sale: Reflecting upon Reproductive Justice through The House for Hidden Mothers and A House of Happy Mothers

21.  Fang Tang, Claiming Motherhood: Reproductive Justice and Surrogacy in Chinese American Literature of the New Millennium

22.  Juliana Buriticá Alzate and Hitomi Yoshio, 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

IV. The right to parent in a safe environment

23.  Diane E. Marting, State Terror and the Destruction of Families for Reproductive “Management” in Three Argentine Films

24.  Melissa Oliver-Powell, Scroungers, Strivers, and Single Mothers: Reproductive Justice and the British Welfare State in Ken Loach’s Social Realism

25.  Ina Seethaler, Reproductive Justice in Undocumented Women’s Memoirs

26.  Kailin Wright, Challenging Racialized Motherhood and the Sixties Scoop with Indigenous Theatre

V. Pedagogy and activism

27.  Layne Parish Craig, “I’ll Never Be Ready!”: Applying a Reproductive Justice Lens in the Lower-Division Literature Classroom

28.  Pamela Fox, Teaching Reproductive Justice: Reading Motherhood with Generations X, Y, and Z

29.  Lauren Wright, Mayday: Rethinking Reproductive Justice Protests Utilizing Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

30.  Heather Brook Adams and M.C. MoHagani Magnetek, Not an Easy Read for “Normal” “Colored” People: Conversations on Shange’s and Rooney’s Literatures of Sexual Citizenship

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.