Jennifer A. Reich

Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal: Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice

Neoliberal cultural frames of individual choice inform mothers’ accounts of why they refuse state-mandated vaccines for their children. Using interviews with 25 mothers who reject recommended vaccines, this article examines the gendered discourse of vaccine refusal. First, I show how mothers, seeing themselves as experts on their children, weigh perceived risks of infection against those of vaccines and dismiss claims that vaccines are necessary. Second, I explicate how mothers see their own intensive mothering practices—particularly around feeding, nutrition, and natural living—as an alternate and superior means of supporting their children’s immunity. Third, I show how they attempt to control risk through management of social exposure, as they envision disease risk to lie in “foreign” bodies outside their networks, and, therefore, individually manageable. Finally, I examine how these mothers focus solely on their own children by evaluating—and often rejecting—assertions that their choices undermine community health, while ignoring how their children benefit from the immunity of others. By analyzing the gendered discourse of vaccines, this article identifies how women’s insistence on individual maternal choice as evidence of commitment to their children draws on and replicates structural inequality in ways that remain invisible, but affect others.

Pregnant with Possibility: Reflections on Embodiment, Access, and Inclusion in Field Research

Contributing to a body of theory that advocates for reflexivity and consideration of embodiment by social researchers, this article explores aspects of performing qualitative research—fieldwork and interviews—on intersections of the private family and the public state while visibly pregnant. Drawing on the authors personal experience of collecting data while pregnant, the paper shows how being pregnant facilitated access in the field, how it helped to reveal unspoken beliefs about normative and non-normative reproduction, and how pregnancy and parenthood provided a level of credibility with respondents. This article also considers the situated meanings of pregnancy in the context of academia.

Not Ready to Fill His Father's Shoes A Masculinist Discourse of Abortion

Many men report a profound experience associated with the abortion of a fetus they coconceived. Yet the meanings of abortion for men remain underinvestigated. Using data from in-depth interviews with twenty men involved in thirty abortions, this article explicates a masculinist discourse of abortion. By examining how men account for the process of deciding to terminate an unintended pregnancy and the meanings of the experience, this article demonstrates how the abortion experience is bound by mens understandings of competent fatherhood and dominant meanings of masculinity. In accounting for the decision to terminate the pregnancy, men consider their relative desire to reproduce themselves, their evaluation of self in relation to idealized fatherhood, and whether they feel ready to take on the role of the provider and head of household. Taken together, these narratives reveal the cultural dominance of narrowly defined expectations of fatherhood and how men articulate a desire for traditional family formation.

Old methods and new technologies: Social media and shifts in power in qualitative research

This article explores how online communications and social networking sites raise new ethical and methodological questions for qualitative researchers who design studies to be primarily ‘off-line’. The author explores how social media affect efforts to recruit participants, gain informed consent, collect data, leave the field, and disseminate results, particularly as participants have greater ability to respond to those findings. In examining the dilemmas ethnographers increasingly encounter, this article points to the shifts of power between participants and researchers and suggests that this might promise greater equity between participants and researchers, while also potentially introducing new pitfalls.

Of natural bodies and antibodies: Parents' vaccine refusal and the dichotomies of natural and artificial

Despite eliminating incidences of many diseases in the United States, parents are increasingly rejecting vaccines for their children. This article examines the reasons parents offer for doing so. It argues that parents construct a dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, in which vaccines come to be seen as unnecessary, ineffective, and potentially dangerous. Using qualitative data from interviews and observations, this article shows first, how parents view their childrens bodies, particularly from experiences of birth and with infants, as naturally perfect and in need of protection. Second, parents see vaccines as an artificial intervention that enters the body unnaturally, through injection. Third, parents perceive immunity occurring from illness to be natural and superior and immunity derived from vaccines as inferior and potentially dangerous. Finally, parents highlight the ways their own natural living serves to enhance their childrens immunity rendering vaccines unnecessary. Taken together, this dichotomy allows parents to justify rejection of vaccines as a form of protecting childrens health. These findings expose perceptions of science, technology, health, and the meanings of the body in ways that can inform public health efforts.

When the Personal is Political—and Infectious

Privilege, distrust, individual choice, and parental care all factor into vaccine resistance, but the consequences are anything but personal.

Reproductive Justice, Vaccine Refusal, and the Uneven Landscape of Choice

Abstract Public health programs facilitate access to resources that not only provide individuals’ options but also often foreclose individual preference through prescriptive requirements. This chapter takes two disparate cases from public health – vaccines and family planning –that reveal patterns of inequality in who has access to individual choice and who requires state support to exercise choice. Looking specifically at dynamics of funding and compulsion, this chapter elucidates how reliance on the rhetoric of individual choice as an expression of freedom rewards those with the greatest access to resources and fails to make sure that all members of the community have the resources to shape their own outcomes or to make sure collective health is protected.