No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive Autonomy

approach is to designate certain neighborhoods as the places where we dump our most dangerous waste products, and then isolate those neighborhoods from the rest of the cities in which they can be found. That is the ‘‘let die’’ approach which, Kim documents in painful detail, creates pockets of cancer clusters, asthma spikes, stillbirths, birth defects, and a host of other and more mysterious ailments among the residents who are considered expendable through a multipronged policy of bioneglect. Kim, a Korean American with a bit of Spanish proficiency, spent three and a half years doing participant fieldwork among the Filipin@ and Latin@ women’s organizations who are trying to protect the neighborhoods around the 43 miles of waterfront taken up by the industrial port belt of Los Angeles. During her time in the trenches, she performed a number of background tasks on behalf of the communities that she set out to study. Sympathetic to their cause, she became a full participant observer in the movement. From this vantage point Kim was able to befriend many of the movement’s leaders and thereby get past the awkwardness of a formal interview in favor of a series of honest conversations. Some of these conversations, which Kim relates with clarity and forthrightness, involve her own privileged status relative to the women she is studying. The author’s ability to grapple with her own positionality, not only while writing the book but also in conversation with her subjects, supports the feeling that this work has achieved the elusive ‘‘rapport’’ that we seek with our research informants. She has captured her subject, warts and all. Refusing Death blends symbolic politics with pragmatic horrors. It demonstrates the power of discursive control in real-world terms. It is an important contribution to social movement studies. No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive Autonomy, by Katrina Kimport. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 226 pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9781978817913.