Visualizing Birth Stories from the Margin: Toward a Reproductive Justice Model of Rhetorical Analysis

ABSTRACT

Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• race
• reproductive justice
• rhetoric
• women of color

Notes

¹ While not all deaf people see deafness as a disability, I analyze this episode based on the assumption that mainstream audiences will consider deafness to be a form of disability. I subscribe to a social model of disability: deaf people are not inherently disabled because of their loss of hearing, but they are disabled by the obstacles imposed by the dominant hearing society (Aldrich).