New Books in Gender

In Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births (MIT Press, 2021), Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick along with more than fifty contributors consider over a hundred designs that have defined the arc of human reproduction. The designed objects that surround people during menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This volume considers a breadth of designs that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century.

It is organized around four sections (Reproduction, Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum) and includes designs such as the menstrual cup, population policy posters, home pregnancy tests, tie-waist skirts, cesarean birth curtains, birth in film, the Kuddle Up blanket, breast pumps, and car seats.

Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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