How does a reproductive justice approach to healthcare change the way we understand childbirth and pregnancy? How can we draw on our holistic, embodied selves to build community in a time of heightened anxiety and precarity?
The guest for today’s episode, Miriam Zoila Pérez, has a diverse body of work that shows why intersectionality is the answer to both of these questions.
In episode 108 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach chats with writer, podcaster, and reproductive justice activist Miriam Zoila Pérez about the racially gendered politics of reproductive health, the intimacy of podcasting in the context of community formation, and why building a world where everyone can create the family of their choosing is how Pérez imagines otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Pérez’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Miriam Zoila Pérez
Miriam Zoila Pérez is an award-winning queer Cuban-American writer and activist. Their work on the intersections of race, health and gender is motivated by a desire to understand how the world shapes our bodies and to explore the many solutions that already exist for some of our biggest problems but simply don’t get the attention they deserve.
Pérez is a freelance writer and the founder of Radical Doula, a blog that covers the intersections of birth activism and social justice from a doula’s perspective. They are also the author of the Radical Doula Guide: A Political Primer for Full-Spectrum Pregnancy and Childbirth Support, which is currently in its third printing.
Their writing has appeared in the New York Times, Colorlines, Splinter, the Nation, the American Prospect, MORE Magazine, Rewire.News, and Talking Points Memo.
Pérez’s TED talk, “How Racism is Harming Pregnant Women–and What Can Help,” has been viewed close to a million times.
They are the co-host of Radio Menea with Verónica Bayetti Flores. Called “the woke Latinx music podcast you should be listening to” by Remezcla and “the soundtrack to a queer mami’s sancocho” by Latina Magazine, Radio Menea is an entertaining bilingual journey through Latinx life and music.
Pérez lives in Washington, DC and is cultivating a new obsession with houseplants.
