Tensions of in/fertility and identity: a rhetorical autoethnography of environmentalism, motherhood, and womanhood

Current politics have reignited and weaponized controversies over women’s bodily autonomy. As an environmental rhetorician who has experienced infertility, I interrogated my own experiences through rhetorical autoethnography. Combining the methodologies of autoethnography and participatory critical rhetorics, rhetorical autoethnography is marked by the personal reflection and embodiment of the researcher while engaging rhetorical theories of meaning-making, symbol use, and identity. I analyzed personal journal reflections of my experiences with infertility, occupying the roles of researcher and object of study. I draw upon the concepts of re-memory, identification, and guilt to analyze three tensions in my re-memories of in/fertility: environmentalist–mother, expert–object, and woman–broken. At times infertile, at times environmentalist, at times mother, at times expert, and at times vulnerable and broken, my shifting identities illustrate the relationship between individual experiences and the larger cultural and political moment around women’s bodies, fertility, and agency.