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...

“Yeah, so yelling at the nurse very clearly does not make this right. She’s just a messenger. There is a way to be diplomatic about it. I like to play the dumb part a lot: ‘You know, I really don’t understand… could you clarify this for me?’ That used to work a lot better as a workaround.” —Emily “Sometimes it’s more talking to myself and talking to the client, like telling them what I see is going on because I guess in that case, my hope is that the provider is hearing it and even if they are not responding, that they are aware that I see what’s going on, and I’m making my client aware of what’s going on. …I know they hear me: the provider can hear me, and the nurses can hear me.” —Margaret “My client is completely bewildered, she is in pain. So me in that moment, I just put my hand on the nurse’s hand that had her breast, and said, ‘could you please not do that?’ And that’s all I said in that moment. And the nurse, she looks at me and she rolls her eyes, but she let go, which is what was important to my client. Afterwards my client said, ‘thank you for that.’” —Malika

This article examines the tactics doulas deploy to support birthing people in a hospital setting, where both the doulas and their clients are marginalized. In order to cultivate and preserve calmness in the birthing room, doulas mobilize what I call “soft advocacy” to avoid overt confrontation with medical staff, while promoting their clients’ preferences and interests. “Soft advocacy” entails affective management of all stakeholders in the room, strategic body positioning by the doula, and descriptive narration that holds medical staff accountable for their actions. These tactics are transferrable outside the birthing room and can be deployed by advocates who want to protect their clients’ interests, but cannot afford to overtly challenge the status quo.

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.

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.