Radical doulas are often on the frontlines supporting multiply marginalized birthing people. In providing emotional and physical support to people in labor, doulas are uniquely positioned to witness, to respond, to intervene in the obstetric racism and other forms of injustice unfolding in birth settings—an invariably rhetorical process. In this interview, we talk with Stevie Merino—medical anthropologist, full-spectrum doula, and the co-founder/executive director of the Birthworkers of Color Collective in Long Beach, California. Merino discusses how reproductive, racial, and queer justice informs her birthwork. This interview highlights the discursive and material strategies queer birthworkers of color deploy to support multiply marginalized clients, and the ways they navigate and challenge the existing medical system.

Belinda A. Stillion Southard’s new book makes a compelling case for rhetorical practices that foster transnational belonging and advocacy among women. At a time when marginalized communities are ac...

Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.

This article posits that inviting students to interrogate and share their worldviews through personal narratives could promote mutual inquiry across difference. Detailing a series of assignments and activities developed from the model of invitational rhetoric, this article analyzes students’ writing and reflections to demonstrate how mutual listening and inquiry function as an effective means to cultivate self-reflexivity and ethical relations with others who do not share the same positionality.

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.