Barbara Katz Rothman

We are all citizens of The Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity — drivers of our access to basic goods and services — rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world. Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.

Sociology alumni Tamara Mose Brown (2008) and Joanna Dreby (2007) are coeditors of Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography (Temple University Press, 2013), which includes chapters written by Professor Barbara Katz Rothman (Sociology, Public Health) and Sociology alumni Erynn Masi de Casanova (2009) and Randol Contreras (2008).

Translated as "Brave New World of Reproduction," this collection of Rothman's essays continues the debate on new reproductive technologies. Topics include the history and development of midwifery, the medical view of pregnancy and birth, and the ramifications of genetic diagnostics. In German. 

Facing the polar forces of an epidemic of cesarean sections and epidurals and home-like labor rooms, American birth is in transition. Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic In Labor: Women and Power in the Birthplace (1982)-based on her dissertation work, it was, the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States-Laboring On gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America. The new first author on this revision, Wendy Simonds, was Professor Rothman's first doctoral student and a CUNY alumna.