Review: Reproductive (In)Capacities: New Perspectives on Pregnancy, Maternity, Sexual Autonomy, and Gender

The four titles that Adams discusses include scholarship from women's and gender studies, communication, and media studies, highlighting how the titles generate productive questions using those fields’ intersections with English studies’ own borders and emerging conversations and also allows that productive reimagining of a topic, both through its relationship with rhetoric and through an analytical melding of the familiar with the new. Adams’s review brings into focus how in representations and theories of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, “power articulates to reproductive capacities through rhetorics of risk, responsibility, fitness, and choice” (pp. 275–276) She argues that these four titles provide “numerous examples of how these terms rhetorically shape understandings of our own biology, perceptions of possibility and impossibility related to sexuality, and the ability to recognize how notions of autonomy might be enmeshed within larger contexts and systems beyond our direct control” (276).