Subtitle: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary Culture
Author: Helena Michie and Naomi Cahn
Subject: Women's Studies/Literature/Medicine
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2432-6
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2433-4
Pages: 224 pp.

"Confinements will infuriate many readers and liberate many more. Michie and Cahn challenge pieties about fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth that dominate not just mainstream advice books, but certain feminisms as well. Their work will free many women from the double binds and 'doublespeak' that confine our thinking about reproduction and the female body."-Rabyn R. Warhol, University of Vermont

"Confinements bridges the fields of literature and law and will bring new perspectives to the ongoing debates on autonomy and agency within feminism and for women in our time."-Frances Bartkowski, author of Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement

"A wonderfully deft analysis of the technologies of reproduction that should help women everywhere loosen the knots of confinement."-Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, MIT, and author of Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology

When a woman in the United States becomes pregnant or tries to become pregnant, she enters a world of information, technology, and expertise. Suddenly her body becomes public in a new way: medicine, law, and popular culture all offer her sometimes contradictory "expert" advice. Confinements explores the advice offered to pregnant and infertile women by examining assumptions about femininity, class, and the reproductive body that structure the language of expertise. Even advice books written from a specifically countercultural or feminist point of view often attempt to police the way women think about their bodies.

Confinements argues that our perceptions about both pregnancy and infertility are limited by our culture's battles over the meaning of choice and control, arguments over what is natural or unnatural, and the troubled relationship between reproduction and the domestic sphere. The book breaks new ground in its analysis of gender, health, and reproduction.

Helena Michie, a professor of English and Women's Studies at Rice University, is the author of The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures, Women's Bodies and Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture.

Naomi Cahn, an associate professor of law at George Washington University Law School, has written for legal journals, including The Cornell Law Review and Texas Journal of Women and the Law.

Key Points:

o The first book to analyze the rhetoric of contemporary advice books on reproduction, with special attention to race and class.

o The first book to show how the contemporary rhetoric about pregnancy and infertility are linked.

o The authors' personal experiences, included in the text, make the book accessible to all readers.