Pandemic Insights: Natalie Fixmer Oraiz on reproductive health + the language of emergency

The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies asked its community of scholars and artists to reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of their research. In this episode, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Assistant Professor in Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, talks about how states, including Iowa, have tried to limit access to abortion during the Covid-19 outbreak. She reflects on the use of emergency language to curtail reproductive rights.

Fixmer-Oraiz is the author of the book Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (University of Illinois Press, 2019), which traces discursive alignments between motherhood and nation in homeland security culture. In Summer 2020, she has an Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant with Sharon Yam to work on a new book, New Grammars for Reproductive Justice, which traces the struggle among health care providers and reproductive justice advocates to invent vocabularies that account for the intersecting systems of oppressions and histories faced by poor women, people of color, queer, trans and non-binary people.