Biased Professor - Monica Casper: Women's Studies

Required Readings

WS 265: Politics of Reproductive Rights
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus by Rayna Rapp (feminist)
Conceiving the New World Order by Faye Ginsburg, Rayna Rapp (feminist)
Fetal Subjects and Feminist Positions by Lynn Marie Morgan
Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice by Jael Silliman

Conceiving the New World Order: The feminist vision here is large, theoretically incisive, detailed, empirically deep, and politically inspiring.

Rapp, a feminist anthropologist at the New School for Social Research; Her analysis of the intersection of reproductive and disability rights and their links to feminist and power issues is interesting. This timely work provides scholars and reproductive rights activists a forum for dialogue about fetuses without conceding to a moral or political agenda that would sanctify them at women’s expense (Fetal Subjects).

Killing the Black Body: The denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy,'' using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective. The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist, and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise.

• When I went to Undivided Rights at Amazon, one of the books listed on "Customers who bought this book also bought:" was Killing the Black Body. Likewise, when I went to Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, the list included Conceiving the New World Order. It doesn't appear there's a whole lot of diversity here.