Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric

Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric uses a feminist disability framework to argue that women’s bodies are understood within a medical framework of pathology directly related to their ability, or inability, to reproduce.

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Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric posits rhetoric and gynecology as sister discourses. While rhetoric has been historically concerned with the regulation of the productive male body, gynecology has been concerned with the discipline of the female reproductive body. Lydia M. McDermott examines these sister discourses by tracing key narrative moments in the development of thought about sexed bodies and about rhetorical discourse, from classical myth and natural philosophy to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decline of midwifery and the rise of scientific writing on the reproductive body. Liminal Bodies offers a metaphorical method of invention and criticism, “sonogram,” that emphasizes the voices and bodies that have been left on the margins of the dominant histories of rhetoric.