Gendered Lives

Julia Wood joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when she was 24. During her 37 years on the faculty, she taught classes and conducted research on personal relationships as well as gender, communication and culture. She was named the Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Humanities and the Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor of Graduate Education. In addition to publishing 25 books and 100 articles and book chapters, she has presented more than 100 papers at professional conferences and campuses around the country. Her accolades include 14 awards honoring her teaching and 16 awards recognizing her scholarship. She received her B.A. from North Carolina State University, her M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University.

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz is F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of HOMELAND MATERNITY: US CULTURE AND THE NEW REPRODUCTIVE REGIME (University of Illinois Press, 2019), an award-winning book that examines the policing of pregnancy and parenting in the United States from a rhetorical perspective, and DOING GENDER JUSTICE: QUEERING REPRODUCTION, KIN, AND CARE with Professor Shui-yin Sharon Yam, currently in production with Johns Hopkins University Press. She has published numerous essays on rhetoric and reproductive justice in outlets such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women's Studies in Communication and Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies. Fixmer-Oraiz co-directs the Reproductive Justice Obermann working group at the University of Iowa with Professor Lina-Maria Murillo. Her scholarship and teaching emerge from a combination of academic training alongside two decades of experience in reproductive politics as a community organizer and advocate in a number of local and regional contexts.