Gena Corea papers

The following biographical information was written by Gena Corea:

Gena Corea is the author of The Hidden Malpractice (1977), which The New Our Bodies, Ourselves wrote “remains the most stunning investigative journalism extant on American medicine’s shameful history toward women”; The Invisible Epidemic (1992), on the politics of the AIDS epidemic for women; and The Mother Machine (1985) which The San Francisco Chronicle wrote “is to the politics of birth, reproduction and reproductive technologies what Susan Brownmiller’s book, Against Our Will, was to rape: A lucid, compelling, relentless visionary analysis that sounds a clarion call to which we should all listen….” In addition, Corea has chapters in 31 anthologies published in the United States, Austria, Canada, Australia, France and Germany.

Corea describes her work this way: “I bring hidden things out into the open. That’s a theme of my work, expressed in my book titles, The Hidden Malpractice and The Invisible Epidemic. In the first half of my life, I listened to women carefully and put their reality out into the public world in the concrete form of books. In these books, I exposed and protested the violence against women in the fields of obstetrics, gynecology and the new reproductive technologies.”

In the later part of her life, Corea listened to men who had committed violence against women. She first moved inward, engaging in a body-centered practice called Focusing. This work prepared her to engage with male convicts in creating a “first-person science of criminology” described in her forth-coming book Table in the Clearing. In this work, men who had committed violence against women used Focusing to explore what led them to attack women and what needs to shift inside men to end such violence. In the collection, the manuscript, in its various drafts, is sometimes titled The Stone Child and Dropping Keys All Night.)