Book Talk: Abortion Activism
Mon Apr 1, 2024 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM EDT
Online, Zoom
Description
Please join the Center for the Study of Women and Society for a book talk with three scholars: sociologist Naomi Braine (author of Abortion Beyond The Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion), historian Sara Matthiesen (author of Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade), and historian, critic, and poet Angela Hume (author of Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defined the Law, and Fought to Keep the Clinics Open).
Naomi Braine is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Prior to joining the faculty at Brooklyn, she worked in the non-profit research sector on issues of drug use and HIV, and consulted for community based organizations. Her political and intellectual work addresses gender, sexuality, reproductive justice, wars on drugs and terror, and health and collective action. Her current work, as an activist and a research investigator, is centered on self-managed abortion. Her newest book, Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion highlights the feminists across Latin America, Africa, and Europe making self-managed abortion available to all - and the transnational movement they have built along the way.
Sara Matthiesen is an associate professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University and the author of Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021). In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for the best monograph on gender and labor from the National Women's Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen's current project, tentatively titled "Free Abortion on Demand" after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States, traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. Her academic work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Feminist Review. Her popular writing can be found in The Boston Review, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and Spectre Journal. Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade is explores how the 'choice' to have children is becoming more myth than reality by showing how the effects of incarceration, for-profit healthcare, disease, and poverty have been worsened by state neglect, forcing most to work harder to maintain a family.
Angela Hume is a feminist historian, critic, and poet. She is the author of two poetry books, Interventions for Women (2021) and Middle Time (2016), and co-editor of the book Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (2018). She teaches writing at University of California, Berkeley. Her newest book, Deep Care, is the story of the radical feminists who worked outside the law to defend abortion.
This event is co-sponsored by: Queens College Women and Gender Studies, the Center for the Humanities, Women's Studies Quarterly, and the Critical Social/Personality Psychology, Urban Education, and the Feminist Press, and the Master's in Liberal Studies programs.