Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy
In the U.S. the most common contraceptive methods rely on women’s time, labor, and vulnerability to risk. Comparatively few people rely on vasectomies as a means of preventing pregnancies. Something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Drawing from her feminist rhetorical study of 37 television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with 17 people who have experienced vasectomy, Jenna Vinson surfaces barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out-of-mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process. This book intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility by identifying the rhetorics that make men’s reproductive bodies seem unnatural sites for pregnancy prevention work. Fostering a persuasive vision of vasectomy is an urgent project that contributes to the movement toward reproductive justice.
1147858514
Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy
In the U.S. the most common contraceptive methods rely on women’s time, labor, and vulnerability to risk. Comparatively few people rely on vasectomies as a means of preventing pregnancies. Something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Drawing from her feminist rhetorical study of 37 television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with 17 people who have experienced vasectomy, Jenna Vinson surfaces barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out-of-mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process. This book intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility by identifying the rhetorics that make men’s reproductive bodies seem unnatural sites for pregnancy prevention work. Fostering a persuasive vision of vasectomy is an urgent project that contributes to the movement toward reproductive justice.
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Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy

Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy

by Jenna Vinson
Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy

Stop Saying Snip!: The Rhetoric of Vasectomy

by Jenna Vinson

Overview

In the U.S. the most common contraceptive methods rely on women’s time, labor, and vulnerability to risk. Comparatively few people rely on vasectomies as a means of preventing pregnancies. Something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Drawing from her feminist rhetorical study of 37 television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with 17 people who have experienced vasectomy, Jenna Vinson surfaces barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out-of-mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process. This book intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility by identifying the rhetorics that make men’s reproductive bodies seem unnatural sites for pregnancy prevention work. Fostering a persuasive vision of vasectomy is an urgent project that contributes to the movement toward reproductive justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781978843585
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 04/14/2026
Pages: 228
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range: 16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jenna Vinson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is the author of Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother.

Table of Contents

Preface                                   
1          Introduction   
            Albert’s Story
2          Insuring (Few) Vasectomies: The Rhetorical Force of Health Insurance
            James’s and Henry’s Stories  
3          Vicious Visions of Vasectomy: Snips, Threats to “Manhood,” & the Pedagogy of Fear     
            Bob’s and Frank’s Stories
4          Obstacles to Telling Personal Vasectomy Stories     
            Dillon’s Story 
5          Women’s (Rhetorical) Work to Facilitate Vasectomies
            Rimi’s and Winifred’s Stories           
Conclusion: A Call to Reconsider Protest Rhetorics and Vasectomy                       

Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography  
Index
 
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