Full Description
"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body." Almost a century after Margaret Sanger wrote these words, women's reproductive rights are still hotly debated in the press and among policymakers, while film, television and other media address issues of birth control and abortion to global audiences.
This collection of new essays brings fresh perspectives to the study of family planning, contraception and abortion with a focus on their representation in popular media. Topics include dramas of adoption and abortion, telling the story of the pill, Sanger's depiction in entertainment media, and a controversy about demographic developments stirred by Carl Djerassi, also known as "the father of the pill."
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Representing Reproductive Rights (Beth Widmaier Capo)
Part 1. Contraceptives in the Media: Spreading the Story
Propagating Progress and Circumventing Harm: Reconciling References to Contraceptives in British Television and Cinema of the 1960s (Jessica Borge)
Pill and Remote Control: Politics of Contraception
in Contemporary U.S. Quality Television (Markus Schleich and Jonas Nesselhauf)
A Romantic Steroid or a Great Performance? Visual Culture
and the Pill (Jamie Wagman)
Sex Education and Social Media: Contraception in the Digital Age (Manon S. Parry)
Part 2. Stories of Forced Adoption
In Search of the New Woman and the Best Mother: Unwanted
Pregnancy in Gina Kaus' Literary and Filmic Work (Regina Range)
Pregnant Girls in the Attic—No Choices: An Analysis of Patrice Toye's Little Black Spiders (Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele and Sofie Decock)
Part 3. From Unplanned to Planned Pregnancies
From Unwanted to Wanted Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Abortion
and the End of the GDR in the Film Jana and Jan (1992) (Belinda Carstens-Wickham)
Finding Humor in Birth Control: Fiction and Film
from Hugh Mills to Matthias Schweighöfer (Waltraud Maierhofer)
Part 4. Abortion Across Cultures: Reproductive Choice, Duty or Crime
When Abortion Was Illegal: Remembrance and Advocacy
in Recent Films from Romania and Mexico—and "I Had an Abortion" Storytelling on the Web (Waltraud Maierhofer)
The Forbidden Pregnancy and the Abandoned Children: On Mo Yan's Fiction about the One-Child Policy and Abortion in China (Shelley W. Chan)
Part 5. Legacies
Woman Rebel: Margaret Sanger and American Popular Culture (Beth Widmaier Capo)
From the Pill to the Pen to the Pill, Again: Carl Djerassi's
Discursive Constructions of Birth Control (Walter Grünzweig)
About the Contributors
Index
