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The basic premise of Body Talk is that rhetoric is a social construction that has the power to create what we assume to be reality; however, this obvious tenet becomes possibly horrific when applied to the rhetoric of those reproductive technologies currently available and those still being developed. “Body talk” is the editors’ term for the intersection of reproductive technologies and the rhetoric that a culture uses to express them, and each of the twelve chapters explores the “clash” of medicine, technology, and culture during the production of “body talk.” This conflict is generally characterized throughout the text by Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power,” which he defines as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (4). Scientific advances in reproductive technologies allow society to be monitored, controlled, and improved to the point that individuals and their bodies become only parts of the system of knowledge, power, and discourse within a society, with cultural ideologies and norms filtering the choices and needs of the individual. This “normalizing” has serious repercussions for the individual and society as it creates the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and then grants the power to define and distinguish between the two only to those with “authoritative knowledge.” Authoritative knowledge, as opposed to experiential or embodied knowledge, is a discursive construct that blurs the line between social order and natural order, thus recursively adding persuasive power to itself.

It is easy enough to recognize and often dismiss or minimize the implications of social construction in pop culture, in advertising, even in our individual gendered selves, but the carefully constructed rhetoric of the reproductive technologies discussed here is not so obvious. Yet, it is just as insidious and potentially dangerous. Technologies are never neutral tools; they are cultural forces, created and controlled for specific purposes. Thus, we must ask of all technologies, but especially reproductive technology, these questions: Who has access? How can it be positively used? What is the potential for abuse? How will it affect knowledge production and the distribution of power? Body Talk demonstrates the power of society to camouflage these issues through the calculated use of everyday rhetoric. Diepenbrock, for example, employs Kenneth Burke’s pentad to analyze case histories on the subject of reproductive technology published in women’s service magazines since 1977. Burke argues that we must think of rhetoric “not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identification that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill” (100). Thus, Diepenbrock explores how seemingly innocuous women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and Ladies’s Home Journal have contributed to the success of the “fertility industry” by publishing case histories‚ often as much fairy tale, heroic quest, and religious miracle as true account. Such tales make childless/infertile women feel obligated to fulfill their obvious (by repetition and reinforcement) duty in life: to bear a child. Similarly, Lyn Turney discusses the politics of language in surgical contraception, where “internal mutilation” of a woman’s reproductive organs is euphemized in medical jargon as [End Page 200] “a simple procedure.” Likewise, Laura Shanner describes the “linguistic diminution” women often encounter at infertility clinics as the physical discomforts and medical risks are minimized and as the patients are objectified as “failures” because they cannot reproduce.

These essays present some of the dilemmas and paradoxes inherent in a discourse concerning the value and quality of human life intersecting with the increasingly rapid development of new reproductive technologies (NRTs). Though Robbie Davis-Floyd ponders possibilities for better communication and understanding in the Afterword, there are definitely no answers supplied in this text. However, this collection is a valuable tool in recognizing the nature of the technomedical rhetoric in which we find ourselves immersed today and offers critical readings of that rhetoric for us to consider before more women “step onto the...