Advancing Reproductive Justice Through Storytelling

The Power of Stories in Advancing Reproductive Justice event took on Monday, April 24 at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which featured a community panel that discussed and reflected on how story telling is a tool for reproductive justice work.  

According to the pamphlet handed out at the event, the two goals for it were to offer examples of storytelling projects addressing various reproductive health topics and needs, as well as to create a space for Milwaukee-area researchers and community members to collectively share their own reproductive health and storytelling projects and facilitate opportunities for future collaboration and learning.  

The community panel featured Maria Barker, a first-generation Mexican who arrived in Waukesha, WI from Atotonilco, Durango Mexico at the age of seven, according to the pamphlets handed out at the event. She is an activist working for the rights of all individuals to live in a society that is equitable and inclusive of all people. She also currently serves in an interim role as the Director of Community Education and Training for Planned Parenthood of WI Inc.  

“I’m a Mexican and feel like I grew up with storytelling,” Barker says. “I always grew up wanting to be male, and the reason I wanted to male I believe is because I didn’t know reproductive justice.”  

During the panel, Barker says that once she recognized that she didn’t know what reproductive was, while living as a Mexican in a ‘machista’ (sexist) world, where men got to decide everything for her.  

“I wanted to make my own decisions and have control over my life, but I just didn’t know how to explain it,” She says.  

The next speaker at the event was Katinka Hooyer, who is a Medical Anthropologist and assistant professor at the Center for Healthy Communities and Reasearch, Family Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin. According to the pamphlet, she is an arts/humanities-based researcher and works primarily in the field of mental health. She works closely and most often with Veterans, co-designing opportunities for healing moral injury and military trauma.  

“I’m connected to stories through being a researcher,” says Dr. Hooyer. “So, I use stories and research as a form of being inclusive.” 

She says she uses stories and her research to include veterans and people recovering from addiction because they typically don’t have the opportunity to take part in the traditional research process. According to Dr. Hooyer, using story as a form as social justice in this type of research works on multiple levels for her.  

“On the first level, it’s very personal,” she says. “I’m working with folks who haven’t been seen, who haven’t been heard, many of them have intellectual disabilities, many of the veterans that I work have traumatic brain injuries.”  

Linking it to reproductive justice, Dr. Hooyer says that one of the things she learnt along the way is that there can’t always be an assumption that people have the words to describe their experience, and part of this is because people don’t always feel safe to talk about their experience.  

“We use the arts as an entry point to talk about it,” she says.  

She says once people are able to talk about their experiences, her goal is to translate these experiences to then train medical providers and healthcare professionals.  

“For me, if we really want to effect change upstream, we have to train people around bias and stereotyping.” Dr. Hooyer says.  

Heddy Keith, who is the founder and CEO of the Center for Leadership pf Afrikan Women’s Wellness (CLAWW), is the third speaker at the event. According to the pamphlet, CLAWW’s mission is to increase awareness and develop a network of services and circles of individualized support for Black/African American women affected by trauma in Milwaukee County.  

“How I connect to story is I’m a writer myself, and I’m a certified journal writing instructor.” Keith says, “We take journalling one step further with expressive writing, being able to express feelings and thoughts and being at some point able to share and talk about that.” 

Keith says she used writing to heal from traumatic experiences in her past, and that story telling was liberating for her, and writing helped her find out things about herself that she didn’t know.  

“To me storytelling is important, it’s a good healing tool.” Keith says. 

The final speaker is Anne Basting, who is a Professor of English at UW-Milwaukee as well as the Founder of non-profit, TImeSlip.org, according to the pamphlet handed out at the event.  

“I see story as how we understand ourselves, to ourselves and how we make sense of ourselves in the world.” Basting says.  

According to Basting, any mode of expression is an opportunity for story, and it becomes a puzzle of inviting a story into existence and then letting it take on its own life. She says there’s interesting work that can be done to understand what’s behind the mindset that disempowers people in the first place.  

“What sort of form could be powerful for these stories to take in order to push back and accumulate to the extent that it changes people’s mindset.” Basting says, “The accumulation of these stories can change the world.”