Reviews and Reactions: A Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis of<i>The Business of Being Born</i>

Owens, Kim Hensley

doi:10.1080/07350198.2011.581947

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Women may choose to breastfeed their children in public as a visual way of disrupting normative discourses about bottle-feeding (Koerber, 2006(Koerber, , 2013. Other scholars have evaluated birth and pregnancy discourses through rhetorical-cultural analyses of popular texts such as The Business of Being Born (Owens, 2011) and the What to Expect series (Dobris & White-Mills, 2006). Others have continued to study these discourses through more recent technological advances in representing pregnancy, such as through the 3D/4D ultrasound (Kroløkke, 2010) and digital photographs of a "pregnant (transgender) man" (Landau, 2012, p. 181), arguing that such visual technologies continue to shape our understandings of pregnancy and the formation of families.…”

Section: Message Design Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing public communication about doulas

Kuehl

Anderson

2015

Commun. Des. Q. Rev

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Expectant parents use health communication messaging to make decisions about their childbirth plans. Recently, women have increasingly chosen to use doulas, or people who provide nonmedical support during childbirth. This essay analyzes how a hospital designed public communication through promotional efforts regarding their no-cost, volunteer doula program. We use rhetorical analysis to analyze 19 promotional texts. By analyzing these materials through the rhetorical method of presence and absence, we found that the health discourse related to the doula program gave presence to expectant mothers. Additionally, the benefi ts of doulas, especially in relation to fathers or partners, remained absent in promoting the volunteer doula program. Through specifi c communication design recommendations, we focus on how to improve this communication to increase the use of doulas in our community, and in other communities. We conclude with implications and limitations of the study. Context of a Community Hospital's Volunteer Doula ProgramIn fall 2011, the local hospital created the volunteer doula program in response to focus groups of community women who requested this service. It was the fi rst free labor and delivery doula program in the state and the fi rst free post-partum doula program in the United States. This study to evaluate the program was approved through the South Dakota State University institutional review board, IRB-1303003-EXM.This case study is part of a collaboration between our interdisciplinary research team and our community's local hospital. In this way, the project took a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach and blended multiple methodologies, including rhetorical

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Section: Message Design Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%