The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World

$10 ($5 students) at the door

presented by Berkeley Arts & Letters

In a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, the author of the New York Times bestsellerKingdom Coming exposes the global war on women’s reproductive rights and its disastrous and unreported consequences for the future of global development. As networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women’s bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise. The Means of Reproduction travels through four continents, examining issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia’s missing girls to show how the battle has been globalized and how, too often, the United States has joined sworn enemies such as Iran and Sudan in an axis of repression. Reporting with unique insight from both the rarefied realm of international policy and from individual women’s lives, Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women’s oppression, and shows how women, strengthened by a solidarity that transcends borders, are fighting for freedom.

Michelle Goldberg is an investigative journalist. A former senior writer at Salon.com, Goldberg has written for Glamour, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (UK), and has taught at New York University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Means of Reproduction won the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.