Clare Daniel

Analyzes two mainstream children’s films, Storks (2016), and The Boss Baby (2017), both of which answer the proverbial question, “Where do babies come from?” Argues that these films bypass the gendered labor of reproduction, forwarding instead a politics of neoliberal multiculturalism in which the entrepreneurial spirit of masculinized reproductive industries appears to facilitate a post-racial utopia.

Shows how state abortion policies impact maternal death in the U.S.

Discusses sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are common and costly in the United States, and people who are Black, American Indian/ Alaskan Native, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander experience consistently higher rates of STIs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2021a; 2021b; 2019c). Elaborates furthermore, STI rates have been increasing across all racial/ethnic groups for the past several years at an alarming rate, particularly among those 15–24 years old (CDC, 2021b).

Provides a crucial tool for feminist educators teaching about reproductive injustice, racism, gender-based oppression, and the power of feminist activism. Summarizes the film and offers a discussion of how it might be used as a tool of feminist pedagogy.

Illustrates that arguments made for sex education in the name of preventing teen pregnancy and for long-acting, reversible contraceptives in the name of preventing abortion undermine the goal of reproductive self-determination.  Reinforces notions that have long plagued advocacy for sex education and birth control in the United States—that certain people are illegitimate reproducers and that specific reproductive options are intolerable.

Examines associations between state-level variation in abortion-restricting policies in 2015 and total maternal mortality (TMM), maternal mortality (MM), and late maternal mortality (LMM) from 2015 to 2018 in the United States.

Analyzes the rebrand of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, demonstrating how institutions can use social change rhetoric to depoliticize that language and reaffirm neoliberal logics. 

Argues that teen pregnancy, specifically since the radical overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, was previously regarded as a social problem requiring public solutions but now is seen as an individual failure on the part of the teens involved.

Examines the social-media-based work of the National Campaign, showing the heavily disciplinary and moralizing functions of these strategies and their role within a new construction of social welfare. Argues that these tactics form a redefined notion of the social safety net based on a vision of citizens distributing vital, attractively packaged information among themselves via a privatized cybernetwork in order to maintain social well-being through the cultivation of proper sexual and reproductive behavior.

Documents the acquisition and processing of an important Native American pictorial archive, the Lee Marmon Pictorial Collection, and to elucidate some of its research and cultural value.

Examines representations of teen pregnancy in 16 and Pregnant. Argues that the show helps consolidate a shift in the dominant discourse of adolescent reproduction, from an issue primarily associated with societal "ills", such as welfare dependence and urban decay in the 1990s, to one marking the personal and moral perils of teen sexual activity in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Reviews "Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption" by Laura Briggs