Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Women's Reproductive Choices
Courtney Adams Wooten, "Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Women's Reproductive Choices"
English | ISBN: 1646424387 | 2023 | 242 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 1646424387 | 2023 | 242 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Childfree and Happy examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa.
Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood.
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