Nathan Stormer, Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric About Abortion in the Nineteenth Century.
Nathan Stormer, Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric About Abortion in the Nineteenth Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002.Reproductive rights and practices exercise considerable force in the unfolding of personal, cultural, biomedical, and, as we were reminded in the recent presidential election, national politics. In Articulating Life's Memory, Nathan Stormer makes a provocative contribution to feminist-historical analyses of the political dynamics of reproduction in the United States. Importantly, Stormer attempts to move us beyond the humanist individualism that has mired abortion debates in a duel over whose individual rights matter. Instead, by scrutinizing an impressive array of medical, legal, and popular historical materials, he explicates how nineteenth-century medical practices and technologies provided moral-biological evidence for construing abortion as an enactment of cultural amnesia, a forgetting of the maternal injunction to reproduce life, both among individual women seeking abortions and in the collective memory. Articulating Life's Memory traces the intricate and often subtle linkages among women's bodies, medical examination techniques and technologies, public morality, racial anxieties, and cultural memory formation that together articulated the premises for an antiabortion rhetoric tied to maternal responsibilities for the integrity of American cultural life.
The book is divided into two major sections. The first is devoted to the nineteenth-century biopolitical and moral-medical contexts within which abortion could be constituted in terms of a "forgetting" of the essential truths of procreation and cultural survival. The second section elaborates on the organic discourse articulating clinical perceptions of female anatomy and moral-cultural norms, gynecological "rituals of exposure" constituting physicians as "modest witnesses" and patients as "legible bodies," and the locales and images of a newly articulated "prenatal space." Together, the two sections document the cultural work of medical practices in articulating "life's memory," that is, in the formation and enactment of a collective memory about life's biocultural truths: the intertwined truths of procreative sexuality, the maternal imperative, and biopolitical vitality and integrity.
While the book deserves to be read in its entirety, the chapters can be read on their own. Indeed, versions of some of them have been published in leading communication and feminist journals. A brief outline of the book's major thesis will have to suffice here. Stormer sets his study in the second half of the nineteenth century when the upheavals of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, emancipation, and modernization were catalyzing critical changes in social life including reproductive customs, specifically, the increasing popularity of abortion among middle- and upper-class women. He argues that medical concerns over affluent abortions were cast within the pernicious racial-ethnic, class, and gender discriminations ingrained in the "regenerative biopolitics" of nineteenth-century U.S. society, a politics aimed at normalizing bourgeoisie entitlements against the perceived threat of non-white, lower-class populations. In this context, antiabortion medical rhetoric construed abortion as not only a perversion of maternal instinct but also as a threat to the fate of the dominant sociocultural order (our children are our future).
Stormer contends that the medical establishment's antiabortion defense of life and culture was premised on a biocultural memory of life's essential order, a memory inscribed in women's reproductive organs and processes and witnessed through scientific-professional modes of clinical perception and diagnosis. He uses the Greek term anamnesis to refer to a way of knowing that recollects an essential reality or truth that a collective has known but fails to recall (an act of "unforgetting" or knowing as remembrance). Abortion advocates and women who had voluntary abortions had "forgotten" the fundamental truths of reproduction that women's bodies knew instinctually and that the new modes of examination and clinical perception consistently recovered. In repeatedly documenting the truths revealed by female anatomy, these new medical diagnostic
practices were hypomnesic practices or ongoing enactments of the body's recollections of life's memory, forming in their reiterations a virtual archive of biomedical-moral evidence mobilized by medical, legal, and sociopolitical interests concerned with the management of life. For antiabortion advocates, then, early medical practices as acts of anamnesis and hypomnesis enacted a normative cultural memory of life's truths embodied in women and witnessed by physicians, a memory formation that haunts us still.
Articulating Life's Memory was awarded the 2003 Best Book Award by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG) for its original contribution to feminist and critical-cultural scholarship. Just 150 pages long (with 48 additional pages of notes), the book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. In addition to original historical research, Articulating Life's Memory innovatively adapts concepts from the work of Foucault, Derrida, de Certeau, Butler, and others to advance methodological arguments for collective memory as performative, medical practices as rhetorical, and articulation "in its multiple senses: to produce intelligible speech, to interconnect, and to create order" (p. 7). Though the dense academic prose will not suit a broad audience, serious scholars will find this study to be theoretically stimulating and historically astute. Both substantively and methodologically, Articulating Life's Memory offers an important resource for feminist, rhetorical, and cultural studies scholars interested in biomedical politics and histories.
Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric About Abortion in the Nineteenth Century by Nathan Stormer is available from Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland. Ppbk price: $25.00. ISBN 0-7391-0430-6. Reviewer Patty Sotirin is Associate Professor of Communication at Michigan Technological University.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Sotirin, Patty |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Women and Language |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2005 |
| Words: | 869 |
| Previous Article: | Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny. |
| Next Article: | Women and surnames across cultures: reconstituting identity in marriage *. |
| Topics: | |