Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780809334056

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Writing Childbirth, Kim Hensley Owens dexterously reads women s experiences around birth as rhetorical negotiations. Although Owens engages women s birth rhetorics at various levels, from broader cultural responses to generic conventions to specific linguistic expressions, her careful rhetorical readings of individual birth plans and birth narratives tease out the subtlest of rhetorical moves and their potential to reposition the women making them. In her respectful incorporation of women s expressed purposes and language, and in the accessibility of her analyses to nonacademic readers, she fulfills her goal of producing research with the potential to support women. J. Blake Scott, author of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing A rhetorical analysis, when well executed, can change the reader s world by forcing us to reinvent, rethink, and reimagine the truths we have held most dear. In Writing Childbirth: Women s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online, Kim Hensley Owens accomplishes all of these things, and more. Owens is one of those rare scholarly writers who can interweave the personal with the professional and the theoretical, resulting in a manuscript that is as informative and persuasive as it is delightful to read. Amy Koerber, author of Breast or Bottle?: Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice

In Writing Childbirth, Kim Hensley Owens dexterously reads women s experiences around birth as rhetorical negotiations. Although Owens engages women s birth rhetorics at various levels, from broader cultural responses to generic conventions to specific linguistic expressions, her careful rhetorical readings of individual birth plans and birth narratives tease out the subtlest of rhetorical moves and their potential to reposition the women making them. In her respectful incorporation of women s expressed purposes and language, and in the accessibility of her analyses to nonacademic readers, she fulfills her goal of producing research with the potential to support women. J. Blake Scott, author of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing A rhetorical analysis, when well executed, can change the reader s world by forcing us to re-invent, re-think, and re-imagine the truths we have held most dear. In Writing Childbirth: Women s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online Kim Hensley Owens accomplishes all of these things, and more. Owens is one of those rare scholarly writers who can interweave the personal with the professional and the theoretical, resulting in a manuscript that is as informative and persuasive as it is delightful to read. Amy Koerber, author of Breast or Bottle: Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice

"""In Writing Childbirth, Kim Hensley Owens dexterously reads women's experiences around birth as rhetorical negotiations. Although Owens engages women's birth rhetorics at various levels, from broader cultural responses to generic conventions to specific linguistic expressions, her careful rhetorical readings of individual birth plans and birth narratives tease out the subtlest of rhetorical moves and their potential to reposition the women making them. In her respectful incorporation of women's expressed purposes and language, and in the accessibility of her analyses to nonacademic readers, she fulfills her goal of producing research with the potential to support women.""--J. Blake Scott, author of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing ""A rhetorical analysis, when well executed, can change the reader's world by forcing us to reinvent, rethink, and reimagine the truths we have held most dear. In Writing Childbirth: Women's Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online, Kim Hensley Owens accomplishes all of these things, and more. Owens is one of those rare scholarly writers who can interweave the personal with the professional and the theoretical, resulting in a manuscript that is as informative and persuasive as it is delightful to read.""--Amy Koerber, author of Breast or Bottle?: Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice"

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available