Congratulations to Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz for winning the National Communication Association's James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address for her book Homeland Maternity: U.S. Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime published by the University of Illinois Press in 2019.
From the National Communication Association’s website:
Working from a reproductive justice framework that is necessarily attuned to race and class and myriad forms of consequential difference, Fixmer-Oraiz keenly demonstrates how topics and practices of maternal “choice” are shaped by discourses of nationalism, racial difference, and poverty. In this finely historicized account of maternity, often understood as salient to cis-sexed humans, Fixmer-Oraiz keeps the reader aware of how trans and gender non-binary people are implicated by or exiled from what is conceptually innovated as homeland maternity. Further still, Homeland Maternity explains why all of the reasoned, rational, and evidenced arguments in the world are not enough; institutional, legal, and rhetorical constructions circumscribe women, pregnant people, those who parent, and mothers and, in so doing, define what evidence is admissible, which authorities are recognized, and what policies can be considered.