Emilie Egger // Williard, Ashley M. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Many of the sources for Ashley M. Williard’s literary analysis in Engendering Islands exist in fragments. Williard’s examination of the sparse and partial traveler’s journals, religious documents, and letters that remain from…
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Update: “Essential Oils and White Motherhood”
Emilie Egger// In September 2018, I wrote my first piece for Synapsis. My article was about essential oils and constructions of white motherhood, how essential oils are a multifaceted part of the post-feminist discourse that highlights sexual difference and the power of domesticity in producing a white, heterosexual future. I also briefly discussed companies’ focus…
Risk for medical violence should be considered in COVID-19 vaccine rollout
Emilie Egger // As the effort to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19 begins, states, scholars, and editorial boards continue to deliberate as to who should receive available supply first. Most conversations coalesce around the “most vulnerable” with a few main definitions of who that includes. The earliest definitions of “at risk” centered on the elderly, residents…
Reproductive politics everywhere: review of Reproduction on the Reservation by Brianna Theobald
Emilie Egger // Of her archival research process for her 2019 monograph Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, historian Brianna Theobald writes that she “never knew where biological reproduction would pop up in the historical record or what would emerge as important context” (14). This realization holds the…
Who Qualifies for Patient Care During COVID-19?
Emilie Egger // During the COVID-19 pandemic, health care routines have shifted dramatically. Ill patients are dying without their loved ones and few patients are allowed advocates in hospitals or doctor’s offices; COVID patients are allowed none. Less dramatic but still significant: primary care has been moved online and elective procedures postponed indefinitely. The crisis…
Listening to patients: learning from sobreparto
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…
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,…
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