Recurring Rhetorics and Cultivating Connections: The Transversals of Rhetoric, Sex, Freedom

Abstract: This paper considers how archival research pedagogies help students explore the history of arguments for reproductive justice and connect them with recurring rhetorics and exigencies. I assign students to research in curated collections of primary sources and digital archives and to create a digital archive that documents past and current rhetoric. The archive applies scholarship on how rhetoric circulates as it looks at topics across temporal and textual boundaries. Students draw connections between the rhetoric of freedom and the imposition of forced-birth, censorship, and anti-trans laws through their exploration of primary sources from several pivotal historical moments in the history of reproductive justice.