Undivided Rights or Tracking Desire

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice

Author: Jael Silliman

"If you have come to help me, please go away. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together."-Lila Watson, Aboriginal Activist

Vibrant. Strong. Fierce. Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice-on their own behalf.

Undivided Rights presents a fresh and textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of colorstarting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities-have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.

The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement-strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise toughquestions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women's organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on "choice."

Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

Go to: MCITP Self Paced Training Kit or Groovy in Action

Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-Tailed Kites

Author: Susan Cerulean

"It took just one sighting of a swallow-tailed kite to dispatch Susan Cerulean on a pilgrimage through its fragmented and ever-shrinking habitats. In Tracking Desire, Cerulean immerses us in the natural history and biology of Elanoides forficatus. At the same time, she sifts through her past - as a child, student, biologist, parent, and activist - to muse on a lifelong absorption with nature." Once at home throughout much of the eastern United States, the swallow-tailed kite is now seldom seen. With ornithologist Ken Meyer, and then on her own, Cerulean roams the kite's much-reduced homelands, gaining knowledge about the bird and the grave threats to its breeding grounds and migration patterns. Her quest takes her to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, to an enormous and vulnerable roost on corporate ranchlands in southwest Florida, and to the remnant pinelands of Everglades National Park.