Emilie Egger // Imagine calling to check up on a friend who has recently given birth. Five weeks postpartum, she tells you she barely has the energy to get out of bed to take care of her baby. Because her family had moved to a new city for work—away from her support system—her partner couldn’t…
Author: emilieegger
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Five Decades of “Semiotic” Fetal Imagery in the US: Part 2
This is the second of two articles on the history fetal imagery in the United States. The first post can be found here. The conflation of fetal rights and human rights extended into the 1990s and continued to obscure the rights of pregnant people. Liberals assembled around the rhetoric of “safe, legal, rare” to accommodate…
Five Decades of “Semiotic” Fetal Imagery in the US: Part 1
Emilie Egger // In July 2019, Dr. Leana Wen resigned from her post as president of Planned Parenthood, citing philosophical differences with her former employer. In an op-ed published in The New York Times published days after her resignation, she summarized their differences as medicine versus politics. “I have long believed that the most effective…
Morality, aesthetics, and fatness: review of Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body
Emilie Egger // Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Bathroom scales, sugar, Cosmopolitan magazine: these three items are linked in contemporary Western understanding of weight loss and management. The first is a gauge of adherence to medical and cultural norms of health;…
In reproductive health care, experience frames more rigorous academic questions
Emilie Egger // “Is it anti-feminist to question the Pill?,” asks writer Anna Silman in her June article in The Cut. In her discussion of the birth-control pill and its side effects, Silman chronicles rising concerns among people who take hormonal birth control. In a piece released the same week in The New York Times,…
Review: “Quackery” highlights history of trusting medical experts
Emilie Egger // Review of Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen. Quackery: a Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc. 2017. The publishers of Quackery promise “67 shocking but true medical misfires that run the gamut from bizarre to deadly,” and the book’s authors are well-suited to this…
Book Review: “Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes”
Emilie Egger// Rojas-Perez, Isaias. Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. “I have interrogated [the] formulation of death as the limit of power or as the power relationship’s outside edge,” anthropologist Isaias Rojas-Perez writes in Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared…
Zika Coverage and the Limits of Repronormativity
Emilie Egger // After nearly two years of distressing headlines, the Zika virus had receded from mainstream news coverage. That was until a newly pregnant Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, set off for a tour of the South Pacific, where the virus has spread in recent months. The optics of hand wringing over the health…
Seeking Purity: Essential Oils and White Motherhood
Emilie Egger // Last summer at a conference on organic farming, I took a “weedwifery” walk with a longtime herbalist. Near the end of the hour-long event, during which the herbalist pointed out the extensive health uses of commonplace plants that usually become subject to removal when they appear in people’s gardens, another conversation emerged….
