Abstract
This essay re/envisions what critical health communication methods look like on the U.S.-Mexico border in reproductive justice contexts. For example, traditional health communication theories and methods have privileged objectivity, generalizability, and the creation of critically important health communication patterns and concepts that have guided the development, deployment, and execution of health communication programs and cultural competence programs. However, in this article, we discuss the utility and application of an intersectional/critical health communication reproductive justice method and envision its praxis in contexts like the U.S.-Mexico border. As two Chicana feminist reproductive justice/health communication scholars, our own research on reproductive feminicides throughout the U.S. and Latin America has necessitated the blending of a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches--border theories, intersectionality, Chicana feminisms, and health communication theories and methods. Thus, this essay traces the blending of these theories and methods and discusses how critical intersectional feminist health communication methods can be utilized in activist ways to resist reproductive and gendered violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Highlights
This essay re/envisions what critical health communication methods look like on the U.S.-Mexico border in reproductive justice contexts
This essay traces the blending of these theories and methods and discusses how critical intersectional feminist health communication methods can be utilized in activist ways to resist reproductive and gendered violence at the U.S.-Mexico border
What can the blending of intersectional feminist methods and health communication methods bring to the proverbial table when considering border activism as a means to disrupt traditional health communication theories, frameworks, and approaches to studying culture and violence against women? By discussing the blending of our research, our activist work, and our lived experiences with activist organizations and birth centers in California and Texas, we analyze how critical intersectional health communication research methods can work in tandem with social justice activism to illustrate the application of critical health communication research praxis to eradicate violence against Latin American migrant women’s bodies, a most pressing global public health epidemic (World Health Organization, 2013)
Summary
This essay traces the blending of these theories and methods and discusses how critical intersectional feminist health communication methods can be utilized in activist ways. From the perspective of survival, “the United States government under the Trump administration is enacting legal policies to sanction family separation and maternal/child abuse while simultaneously evading its hand in spearheading wars throughout Latin America that necessitated the need for asylum seeking in the first place” In the fall of 2018 Customs and Border Protection Agents began using a process called “metering,” which involved standing in the middle of international bridges in El Paso/Juárez, holding semiautomatic rifles and preventing migrants from stepping foot on U.S soil to legally claim asylum in an effort to limit to number of asylum seekers allowed to enter the U.S on any given day (Moore, 2018a, 2019a) This practice left hundreds of migrant families, many with young children, camping out on international bridges to avoid losing their places in line. Hernandez’s murder and Medina’s death are but two examples of the gendered violence occurring at the border transpiring in tandem with other gendered and reproductive injustices, which is what inspired the origins of our intersectional/critical health communication reproductive justice method
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