Goodbye, “post-pill paradise”: Texturing feminist public memories of women's reproductive and rhetorical agency

Abstract

ABSTRACTOral contraception (e.g., “the pill”), an iconic technology and everyday object, has shaped women's embodied experiences and notions of self. Feminist remembrances of the pill often credit it with granting women unprecedented agency, sexual and otherwise. This article examines pill advertisements at the time of the drug's emergence. By identifying three distinct user motifs – the reliant beneficiary, the discreet consumer, and the forgetful woman – I trouble a widely reiterated liberatory narrative of technological freedom through scientific and medical discovery. Simultaneously, I examine gendered anxieties that emerge alongside women's increasing capacity for sexual autonomy. Through this index and analysis of expressions of agency, I open a space for reconsidering women's relationship to the pill as a technological object and assay the distributed agency that this ecology suggests. I use this case study to propose the political and theoretical value of more fully understanding feminist agency as paradoxical and to advocate for further investigations into vexing sites of feminist memories.