HOMELAND MATERNITY: US SECURITY CULTURE AND THE NEW REPRODUCTIVE REGIME
Read an excerpt here
In US security culture, motherhood is a site of intense contestation—both a powerful form of cultural currency and a target of unprecedented assault. Analyzing the opt-out revolution, public debates over emergency contraception, and other controversies, Fixmer-Oraiz traces the intimate entanglements of motherhood and nation, demonstrating how policing maternal bodies serves the political function of securing the nation in a time of supposed danger—with profound implications for reproductive justice.
Winner of the 2020 James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association
Finalist for the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award
Additional Praise for Homeland Maternity:
"I love Homeland Maternity. It's brilliantly conceived, broadly interpretive and intersectional, wisely written, politically astute, and very useful. I wanted to underline nearly every sentence. Fixmer-Oraiz has crafted an extremely smart and scary book."
--Rickie Solinger, coauthor of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
"This book is devastatingly good. Good because it is elegantly written, tightly argued, and theoretically informed and informative. Devastating because it makes clear that a nasty thicket of laws, institutions, and rhetoric values pregnancy (even a potential pregnancy) more than the integrity, safety, and humanity of women, pregnant people, and mothers."
--Catherine Helen Palczewski, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa
"Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime is a timely and important text that uses a reproductive justice framework to interrogate how dominant rhetorics of emergency, risk, crisis, and security are used to police and regulate women’s bodies and the bodies of gender-nonbinary individuals who carry and parent children...[it]
is intellectually rigorous, forceful, and timely to the current sociopolitical context."
--Shui-yin Sharon Yam, author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship
"In this clearly written and cogently argued book that ranges across a broad array of public discourse, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz brings into focus the disturbing intersections between reproductive politics and national security in the post-9/11 era. Historically and theoretically informed, Homeland Maternity makes clear that the regulation of women’s bodies is a key weapon in struggles over nationalism, nativism, and the meaning of security."
--Bonnie J. Dow, author of Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News
"A must-read for scholars interested in contemporary motherhood and/or the rhetoric of security. In Homeland Maternity, Fixmer-Oraiz offers an incisive analysis of an eclectic set of texts to illuminate how the long-standing connections between discursive constructions of motherhood and the nation function in the post-9/11 United States."
--Sara E. Hayden, coeditor of Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth