Editorial Introduction: The Politics and Rhetorics of Embodiment

This issue of Feminist Formations is about the body. We did not issue a call for papers directly on this topic, but the excellent manuscripts we have recently received about the body indicate that there is clear interest in this complex subject. The articles in this issue represent a range of writing styles, theoretical approaches, (inter)disciplinary orientations, and lived experiences. They also raise compelling questions that beg engagement, yet resist simplistic response and deny the possibility of closure.

In our opening article, "Pregnant Pause," Julija Šukys elegantly discusses her research on Lithuanian librarian Ona Šimaitė's life and role in the Holocaust. Šukys explores how her understanding of Šimaitė's life was deeply affected by Šukys's experiences of and beliefs about motherhood. Intertwining her story with Šimaitė's, Šukys reflects to her son:

To her, as a librarian, as an archivist and as a writer, what mattered most were the printed text and the written word. Bodies, she would have said, do not endure, and are therefore not worth burying, not worth archiving. . . . And while I understand her and respect her ultimate gift, I see that things are different for us. For you and for me, bodies do matter. Mine gave me you.

This article leaves us to ponder: What types of knowing are facilitated, interrupted or transformed by women's experience of bringing life into or saving lives in our world? How are bodies constructed as irrelevant or significant based on the circumstances of one's existence?

The second article, D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein's "The Intriguing History and Silences of Of Woman Born" reconsiders Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution to reclaim its merits for contemporary understandings of motherhood. Acknowledging that white second-wave feminism emphasized Rich's thoughts on the mother-daughter relationship over her ideas about motherhood and mothering, O'Brien Hallstein asks:

What does an analysis of both Rich's own rhetorical strategies and the larger rhetorical situations—both outside and inside feminism—reveal about the historical response to Of Woman Born and the unexplained silences associated with the text? What are the implications and lingering legacies of both within contemporary feminist maternal scholarship?

Mothering is taken up as both individual and institutional, biological and sociocultural, and our opening articles argue for its continued importance in the field of women's and gender studies.

Subsequent articles turn directly to the politics of reproduction from many different perspectives. Karen Weingarten's "The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger" discusses two historical leaders whose rhetoric about women's reproductive rights seemed divergent, yet worked in a complementary fashion to strengthen the argument against legalized abortion. Weingarten asserts that Sanger and Comstock "shared a discourse based on individuated freedoms that works to manage bodies and populations," and that the rights rhetoric used at this time continues to be part of abortion debates to this day.

Muriel Lederman's "The Genomic Revolution" also analyzes the construction of rhetoric related to reproductive choices. Lederman discusses how the Human Genome Project is rhetorically constructed for public audiences such that it obscures questions about the ethics and implications of genetic choices and policies. Specifically, she asserts:

The [Human Genome] exhibit favors the assumption that genetic information will be used for human benefit. This assumption is unexamined—few, if any, countervailing arguments are presented. There is no indication that such arguments might exist or that discussions about the risks and benefits of the application of sequence information should occur broadly, even though the exhibit says that the impact of the technology can profoundly affect our species.

Lederman emphasizes the importance of those translating science into public knowledge presenting a range of perspectives on potentially life-changing scientific developments. Likewise, she urges those of us who will undoubtedly be affected by those developments "to engage with the developers and users of genetic information to make responsible decisions for themselves, as members of the family of humans, and as inhabitants of our planet."

Anna Curtis's "Giving 'Til It Hurts" engages the social, medical, and reproductive interactions that become both possible...