Jess Marie Newman

Overview

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

Visiting Scholar in Anthropology 

Jess Marie Newman is a feminist educator, critical medical anthropologist, and mother. Dr. Newman’s forthcoming book, Abortion, Sovereignty, and Patriarchy in Morocco will be out with University of California Press in Spring 2027. Abortion, Sovereignty, and Patriarchy in Morocco argues that abortion is sovereignty, tout court. Abortion politics are the originary terrain of necropolitical sovereignty, the power to make live and let die, to render certain bodies mere flesh, sacrificeable. Abortion is the sine qua non bodily sovereignty,which is precisely why heteropatriarchal states like Morocco criminalize it and keep it unsafe. Morocco is one of  many countries around the world that pass for something called “moderate” on abortion—those that criminalize abortion while creating specific legal exceptions to safeguard maternal survival. Here, the ambiguity of “health” in criminal law runs up against its robust definition in supranational rights discourses, allowing states and practitioners alike a wide degree of latitude when assuming what falls under a health exception—or not. The book critiques how pronatalism and maternalism, the valorization of birth and motherhood, provide states like Morocco with rhetorical cover while dispossessing feminized and maternal subjects of their bodily sovereignty. Abortion, Sovereignty, and Patriarchy in Morocco makes forceful contributions to necropolitical theory and feminist theories of refusal to clarify the stakes of abortion’s politics, globally. Throughout the book, Newman centers feminist ethnographic praxis and affective writing, leverage voice to vivify abortion politics from the United Nations to the Emergency Room.

Dr. Newman’s other works in progress include “Unspeakable: Fieldwork Abortions at the Limit of Reflexivity,” an experimental forensic autoethnography that explodes the silences across fieldnotes, personal journals, doctor’s appointments, rebooked flights, and calendar entries, evidencing the fieldwork abortion she tried to erase. The essay will appear as part of a special issue of Feminist Anthropology co-edited by Elise Andaya and Risa Cromer in 2027. 

Newman is a passionate educator who has taught and learned from her students in anthropology and feminist studies for over a decade. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell University, Dr. Newman was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Temple University with appointments in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Global Studies. Dr. Newman was also a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Dr. Newman received her PhD in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University in 2017. Her dissertation, “Making the Mére Célibataire: NGOs, Activism, and Single Motherhood in Morocco" received the Association for Feminist Anthropology Dissertation Award.

Courses Taught

• Mobility and Global Inequality
• Medical Anthropology
• People and Cultures of the Middle East
• Anthropology of the Family
• Fieldwork and Ethnographic Methods
• Anthropology of Public Health
• Ethnographic Approaches to Reproductive Justice
• North African Feminisms

Research Focus

Abortion, single motherhood, social movements, media analysis, affect, sovereignty, necropolitics, heteropatriarchy, North Africa and the Mediterranean