Writing Childbirth: Women's Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online (Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms) - Softcover

Owens, Kim Hensley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809334054 ISBN 13: 9780809334056

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr, 2015

Synopsis

Writing Childbirth: Women’s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online demonstrates the value of Widening the lens of rhetorical investigations of health and medicine beyond the interactions between patients and physicians and the discourse of physicians. Author Kim Hensley Owen draws on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as her own childbirth writing survey, to explore how women create and use every day rhetoric’s to assert agency in planning for, experiencing, and writing about childbirth. Seeking to challenge or expressing concerns about institutionalized medicine, women exercise rhetorical agency in undeniably feminist ways through the writing of birth plans and birth stories.

Owens considers how women’s rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. This book reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations.

About this title

About the Author

Kim Hensley Owens is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on the intersections of rhetoric, feminism, science and health, and ethnography. She has published essays in Rhetoric Review, Computers and Composition, JAC, and Enculturation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809334054
• ISBN 13: 9780809334056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226