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This essay explores the genre of the mommy memoir for its abortion politics. Buildingon feminist critiques of the genre's reliance on bio-essentialist ideas of motherhood, Iconsider both the potential and limitations within the genre for representing abortionexperiences. In this essay I analyze Irene Vilar's Impossible Motherhood:Testimony of an Abortion Addict (2009) for its rhetorical appropriation of themommy memoir form in order to tell a story of reproductive excess.

"American historians began producing in-depth studies of slavery and slave life shortly after World War II, but it was not until the early 1980s that the country's museums took the first tentative steps to interpret those same controversial topics. Perhaps because of the tremendous amount of primary material related to George Washington, almost no one looked into the lives of Mount Vernon's enslaved population. Incorporating the results of detailed digging, of both the archaeological and archival varieties, the number of chapters grew as further questions arose. While a few scholars outside Mount Vernon turned their attention to Washington's changing ideas about slavery, they largely overlooked the daily lives of those who were enslaved on the estate, a subject about which visitors expressed a desire to know more. The resulting book makes use of a wide range of sources, including letters, financial ledgers, work reports, travel diaries kept by visitors to Mount Vernon, the reminiscences of family members, former slaves, and neighbors, reports by archaeologists, and surviving artifacts to flesh out the lives of a people who left few written records, but made up 90 percent of the estate's population. The book begins with a look at George and Martha Washington as slaveowners, before turning to various facets of slave life ranging from work, to family life, housing, foodways, private enterprise, and resistance. Along the way, readers will see a relationship between Washington's military career and his style of plantation management, learn of the many ways slaves rebelled against their condition, and get to know many of the enslaved people who made Mount Vernon their home"--

Reclaiming the Wild Soul takes us on a journey into Earth's five great landscapes — deserts, forests, oceans and rivers, mountains, and grasslands — as aspects of our deeper, wilder selves. Where the inner and outer worlds meet we discover our own true nature mirrored in the Earth's wild beauty and fierce challenges. A powerful archetypal model for transformation, the "soulscapes" return us to a primal terrain rich in knowing, healing, and wholeness. To guide our path, each soulscape offers up wisdom in the form of soul qualities the modern world often undervalues and even undermines. We see h

"A collection of essays examining the connections between abortion, adoption, and commercial surrogacy in the global context of reproductive politics in the neoliberal age, interrogating how contemporary understandings of the construction of family expand choices for some women while limiting choices for others"--