Robin Jensens thoughtful and engaging study interrogates a complicated matrix of cultural narratives, medical epistemologies, and gender normativities in order to scrutinize the evolution and constitution of infertility. Her investigation of infertilitys medicalization, shaped by metaphors that simultaneously percolate and lurk at particular historical moments, is compelling in its execution and impressive in its scope. Jensens sweeping archive and innovative thesis resist narrative simplicity, offering a valuable contribution to the field of rhetorical studies.
Jeff Bennett, author of Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance In Infertility, Robin Jensen examines how discourses of infertility change over time, deftly revealing how these discourses do not follow a linear progression but instead shift, overlap, disappear, and re-emerge. Scholars of the rhetoric of science and medicine, medical and health humanities, and science and technology studies will marvel at her insightful, fine-tuned analysis, which beautifully illustrates how medicalized discourses continue to moralize, positioning infertile women as degenerate, noncompliant, or untimely despite ever greater technological and medical advances.
Jordynn Jack, author of Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks Robin Jensen asks, What is human infertility? How do we understand that involuntary childlessness known at different times, and within different rhetorical ecologies, as barrenness and sterility? She constructs her answer by weaving a rhetorical-historical account that is informed and engaging, layered and complex: no linear narrative here. The book is a shining example of what critical rhetoricians do, and how and why we do it.
Judy Segal, author of Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine Jensens book, which will likely have the greatest appeal for historians with an interest in theory and method, further demonstrates the significance and value of cross-disciplinary inquiry to the history of science and medicine.
Margaret Marsh Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society
