Overview

Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric posits rhetoric and gynecology as sister discourses. While rhetoric has been historically concerned with the regulation of the productive male body, gynecology has been concerned with the discipline of the female reproductive body. Lydia M. McDermott examines these sister discourses by tracing key narrative moments in the development of thought about sexed bodies and about rhetorical discourse, from classical myth and natural philosophy to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decline of midwifery and the rise of scientific writing on the reproductive body. Liminal Bodies offers a metaphorical method of invention and criticism, “sonogram,” that emphasizes the voices and bodies that have been left on the margins of the dominant histories of rhetoric.

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9781498513395

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This beautifully written, deeply and eclectically researched book expands the fields of embodied rhetoric and disability studies. Historical and personal, reflective and political, careful and empowering, the reader is left listening for rhetorical echoes and reverberations wherever maternity, embodiment, and ability are invoked-and whenever the normative character of these concepts is ignored. Scholarly books should all be written so resourcefully, artistically, and honestly. -- Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo

Author Information

Lydia M. McDermott is assistant professor of composition and the director of the Center for Writing and Speaking at Whitman College.

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