Telling Bodies Performing Birth

Considering issues such as pain and fertility, and exploring both the language of medical discourse and the silence of personal mystery, she reveals the numerous ways in which giving birth is narrated in the contemporary U.S. Pollock draws on cultural criticism, performance studies, and narrative theory to unpack this long-ignored genre.

Birth stories, Della Pollock tells us, "are everywhere and nowhere," permeating and haunting our everyday lives. In this remarkable volume Pollock explores the myriad ways in which men and women recount the ritual performance of giving birth. Many of these stories, Pollock observes, rise out of the depths of terror, flirting with disaster only to end with a profound sense of relief at what medical discourse calls a "good outcome." Others represent pain, make counterclaims on reproductive technologies, and suggest complex associations between maternity, sexuality, and body politics in the contemporary United States. Pollock retells stories about some of the injustices that structure giving and telling birth––finding there a reckoning with the unknown and unknowable. Focusing on the performances of birth stories, Pollock writes an intimate ethnography: an account of listening "body to body" to stories that press the borders of cultural critique with virtuosity, possibility, desire, and risk. She draws on cultural criticism, performance studies, and narrative theory to unpack this long-ignored practice. Most striking, however, are the stories presented here: unsanctioned, bold, fragmentary, and often furtive, they both unnerve and inspire even as they realize and resist cultural norms.

Considering issues such as pain and fertility, and exploring both the language of medical discourse and the silence of personal mystery, she reveals the numerous ways in which giving birth is narrated in the contemporary U.S. Pollock draws on cultural criticism, performance studies, and narrative theory to unpack this long-ignored genre.

In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere. From an adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, from Kanter’s own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist’s response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action. Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter’s pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.

Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth. Adopting a unique theoretical framework incorporating new materialism, feminist theory, and a Foucauldian ‘analytics of power’, the book aims to trace and trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about birthing bodies. Through a diffractive and dialogical approach, the analysis highlights the interplay between corporeality, power, and ideologies in the making of birth narratives across a range of intersectional differences. The book shows that there is no singular birthing body apart from sociomaterial relations of power. Instead, birthing bodies are uncertain zones or unpredictable assortments of physiology, flesh, sociomateriality, discourse, and affective flows. At the same time, birthing bodies are located within intra-acting fields of power relations, including biomedicine, racialized patriarchy, socioeconomics, and geopolitics. Bodies that Birth brings the voices of women from different sociomaterial positions into conversation. Ultimately, the book explores how attending to birthing bodies can vitalize global birth politics by listening to what matters to women in relation to birth. This is fascinating reading for researchers, academics, and students from across the social sciences.

Theories of Performance invites students to explore the possibilities of performance for creating, knowing, and staking claims to the world. Each chapter surveys, explains, and illustrates classic, modern, and postmodern theories that answer the questions, "What is performance?" "Why do people perform?" and "How does performance constitute our social and political worlds?" The chapters feature performance as the entry point for understanding texts, drama, culture, social roles, identity, resistance, and technologies.

Finding Nothing explores the eruption of avant-garde writing in Vancouver that re-invented the culture of the city in the second half of the twentieth century.

Tami Spry provides a methodological introduction to the budding field of performative autoethnography including examplars and exercises for the novice.

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication is a vital resource for those seeking to explore the complex interactions of gender and communication. Editors Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Wood, together with an illustrious group of contributors, review and evaluate the state of the gender and communication field through the discussion of existing theories and research, as well as through identification of important directions for future scholarship. The first of its kind, this Handbook examines the primary contexts in which gender and communication are shaped, reflected, and expressed: interpersonal, organizational, rhetoric, media, and intercultural/global. Key Features: Brings together the expertise of leading scholars: Esteemed scholars edit each section and leading researchers in the field author each chapter. The distillation of scholarship in each area by seasoned scholars clarifies what is and is not known in that area of research. Offers historical and theoretical perspectives: Authors discuss the development of gender and communication research during the past three decades and examine the theories, questions, and issues about gender and communication that are ascending to define the next stage of work in the area. Provides comprehensive reference lists: Each section summarizes existing theory and research related to an area of gender and communication scholarship and guides readers to the central works in the field, as well as directs future scholarship toward the most urgent, important, and promising topics, methodologies, and/or perspectives.

Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Criticism offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture. offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture.