We invite readers to imagine Graphic RHM as more than a column but a growing community of practice (CoP) and offer two analogies for doing so: 1) a mycelial network with connections branching across the fields of rhetoric, health and medicine, and the graphic arts, and 2) a beehive, where sustained growth comes from intentional contributions and shared effort. The comics featured in Column 2 (https://medicalrhetoric .com /graphicRHM /home /archive/column -2/), including Ann E. Fink’s “The Work of Grief,” reflect the range and depth of work emerging from this CoP.

Survivor’s guilt haunts countless veterans, yet little research examines how veterans rhetorically process this experience. This study analyzes poetry from post-9/11 veterans to identify a distinct rhetorical mode we term reparative ethos.  While existing Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR) has identified and extensively explored recuperative ethos—strategies used to restore credibility in the face of externally imposed stigma—we propose that some veterans may also engage in what we call reparative ethos. Unlike recuperative ethos, which addresses externally imposed stigma through appeals to living audiences, reparative ethos aims to make amends to internalized representations of lost comrades. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s object relations theory and MHRR, we analyze poems from Warrior Writers anthologies that explicitly address survivor’s guilt. Our analysis reveals that veterans engage in narrative acts of reparation directed toward deceased others, addressing both the loss of external relationships and threats to internalized military ethos. This research extends MHRR by demonstrating how trauma can generate inward-facing rhetorical strategies focused on healing rather than persuasion, offering new frameworks for understanding veteran mental healthcare and creative expression.

Overall, vaccine acceptance appears to be high. But vaccine hesitancy persists nonetheless. This article draws on moral foundations theory (MFT) to rhetorically explore possibilities of storytelling within the genre of the vaccine anecdote, a form of discourse common to vaccine-skeptical discourses. Informed by social scientific accounts of the moral foundations associated with high vaccine hesitancy, I analyze three examples of pro-vaccine anecdotes—an anecdote of injury, an anecdote of conversion, and an anecdote of positive outcome—to explore strategies of personal storytelling toward the values of vaccine-hesitant publics. From the analysis, I describe three specific modes of storytelling (haunting, continuing, and intuiting) while weighing their varying promise for aligning vaccine-supportive anecdotes with mild or more extreme levels of vaccine hesitancy.

Those who love people with dementia often experience the phenomenon of ambiguous loss, where the individual with dementia is both present and absent. This essay analyzes Kirsten Johnson's 2020 documentary Dick Johnson is Dead as a performance of ambiguity, extending Arthur Frank's (2013) framework of illness narratives and Kenneth Burke's (1945) concept of ambiguity. I propose that narrative ambiguity can serve as an organizing heuristic for understanding the complexity of ambiguous loss and dementia. The essay examines four key aspects of narrative ambiguity in the film: the ambiguity of presence, time, persona, and setting. By exploring these components, I demonstrate that performing an ambiguous narrative can foster acceptance of ambiguity for both the performer and the audience. Narrative ambiguity offers a valuable alternative framework for understanding ambiguous loss and broader narratives about individuals with dementia.

This article demonstrates the value of sentiment analysis for contextualizing audiences in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) by comparing vaccine related newspaper comments to non-vaccine related comments in the New York Times from 2017–2023 (n = 22,330,999). Our results show that while all comments skew negative, following a similar trend line, after the emergence of COVID-19, vaccine related comments decouple from the negative trend of baseline non-vaccine comments, becoming more negative and volatile. These results raise additional questions about the nature of the negativity for vaccine related comments, and we provide a properly sampled dataset for follow-up research to encourage iterative investigation into the public response to vaccine policy. In addition to these findings, this article calls for broader engagement with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data science in RHM.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 9 Issue 1

What makes societies see, acknowledge, and constitute an issue as a crisis which should be acted upon? We address this by examining a specific instance of media attention to a creeping health crisis, namely the communication of an individual non-governmental actor, the influencer Ingeborg Senneset. We ask: What is the rhetorical agency of an individual opinion leader (influencer) in a health risk situation such as the creeping AMR-crisis? Our study demonstrates that the rhetorical agency of Senneset as an influencer rests on three interrelated communicative strategies: First, she enacts what we term a multiple ethos implying both the expertise of a professional and the authenticity of an ordinary person; Second, she uses narratives of fear with a rational grounding; Third, she establishes and works rhetorically within a diverse digital ecology where she publishes, posts, and comments on several different platforms, where the different posts and publications reinforce each other.

This article engages with rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship on embodiment and expertise in online health communication to demonstrate how rhetorical tactics help patients make embodied health decisions. This study analyzes 320 online postings, 84 published narratives, 30 surveys and written reflections, and 10 interviews in an online health community for Asherman syndrome (AS), a rare illness that develops after reproductive surgery. The findings of this study highlight how patients incorporate online information into their decision-making practices by accumulating embodied knowledge, tailoring questions, insisting on specific treatments, and switching healthcare providers. This article argues that patients’ rhetorical tactics, when shared and accumulated over time, can transform treatment outcomes.

This paper explores how an intellectual account that describes eyes as cameras shapes clinical practices of measurement and correction in vision care. For patients with eye movement disorders (EMDs), which are complex, not easily treated, and often incurable, the acuity-centric system of vision care often reduces their experiences to standardized assessments that fail to address the full scope of their needs. Bringing together rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research, quality-of-life studies, patient testimonies, and qualitative responses from our survey of people with EMDs, we examined patients’ frustrations within a system that prioritizes acuity correction over a nuanced understanding of their complex conditions. We used the framework of the quest narrative as derived from the domains of theater and improv to highlight the multiplicity of ways that people with non-normative bodies navigate a normative infrastructure over time. This paper contributes to RHM scholarship in two primary ways: 1) by operationalizing critical disability studies critiques of biomedical normativity within care contexts and 2) detailing the care-related experiences of people defined as having rare disabilities or diseases.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 8 issue 4

We draw on William L. Benoit’s image repair theory to examine the case of Jesse Gelsinger, who died during a clinical trial testing the safety of a highly anticipated gene therapy treatment. We argue the primary biomedical researcher blamed for Gelsinger’s death used image repair strategies to frame his controversial research as a regrettable but important moment in the larger pursuit of frontier science in which he claimed to have acted humanely. We explain how health and medical professionals apologizing for biomedical tragedies risk demeaning the public they already harmed. Our study tries to account for image repair’s essential but contradictory role in dangerous frontier biomedicine, and we draw novel connections between image repair strategies and the rhetorical concepts of synecdoche and metonymy.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 8 issue 3

This article breaks from the traditional structure of social science research reports to offer an alternative approach to sharing findings by willfully wading through the methodological mess of research. By narratively reporting results from a site-based study of an acute care simulation, I treat disclosure of my analytical journey as a productive method for introducing and unpacking two key constructs that emerged from my research: “metarhetorical attunement” and “kairotic hinges”; constructs that implicate and seek to develop our critical, rhetorical understandings of time, place, and (in)action. Furthermore,  not only do I describe how these constructs operate within a simulation setting, but I model my personal use of them as a researcher participating in a community of practice.

PCOS Discourses, Symbolic Impacts, and Feminist Rhetorical Disruptions of Institutional Hegemonies. Marissa C. McKinley, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023. 162 pages, $95.00 hardback, $45.00 ebook. Publisher’s webpage: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666905519/PCOS-Discourses-Symbolic-Impacts-and-Feminist-Rhetorical-Disruptions-of-Institutional-Hegemonies.

The End of Genre: Curations and Experiments in Intentional Discourses, Brenton Faber. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022. 244 pages, $99 eBook, $129 softcover; $129 hardcover. Publisher webpage: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-08747-9

While parents have long turned to experts of various kinds for childrearing advice, books like Emily Oster’s Cribsheet suggest that parents can empower themselves by using research on child development to inform their parenting decisions. The online community r/ScienceBasedParenting was designed as a “safe space” for this kind of parental labor, allowing users to request evidence-based advice without the threat of misinformation that often plagues online parenting spaces. This article analyzes how users of this community establish a boundary between science and nonscience, establishing science as an amorphous shared value rather than a set of processes or standards. The community establishes personal feelings and experiences as unscientific and implicitly inferior to “science,” vaguely construed, and user conversations indicate the struggles associated with this construction. The community’s internal rhetoric illustrates that there are limits to the reassurance and empowerment that evidence-based parenting can provide.

The following article is a rendering of the opening keynote speech given by Dr. Kimberly Harper at the 2023 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) Symposium that took place in Minneapolis, MN on October 13–14, 2023.

This essay, adapted from one of the keynotes of the 2023 RHM symposium, explores the potential of linking the fields of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and environmental rhetoric, and argues that health and healing are inextricably linked to the living world. Drawing on personal narrative, several brief case studies, and the conclusion of the author’s recent book, it charts several future research directions when environmental matters are understood as matters of health.

In response to a documented disproportionate incidence of suicide in rural America, this autoethnographic essay explores specific ideological and historical factors influencing this disparity and mental health issues connected directly to farmers. Situating her discussion in the context of her family’s five-generation farming operation, Ryan draws on dominant “good farmer” constructs and intersectional identities to critique mental health resources available in a Corn Belt farming community. The chronic pressure placed on farmers in a productivist agricultural climate urging them to do more and be more requires acknowledgement of the complexities and nuances of farmer identities and behaviors.

Perinatal mental health disorders (PMHDs) include perinatal depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, or postpartum psychosis. U.S. rural communities often lack access to perinatal and mental health care; taken together, this health issue of PMHDs in the rural United States is complex. As polydisciplinary scholars of rhetoric of health & medicine (RHM), health communication, and public health, we explore: how do rural U.S. communities navigate the public health crisis of PMHDs? To answer that question, we contextualize PMHDs within mental health rhetoric research (MHRR). We review literature about narrative and social support as tools for communicating about PMHDs in rural U.S. communities. We suggest future research directions for better understanding communication about PMHDs in the rural U.S.

Introduction to the special issue on rural health.

This dialogue examines rural health and healthcare by putting rhetoricians who study rural communities in direct conversation with healthcare professionals who practice in and advocate for rural communities. Thematic analysis of the dialogue revealed that conversations about healthcare in rural communities can simultaneously address what rural communities lack, how rural communities are exploited, and how strong and resilient rural communities are, while also emphasizing what opportunities there are for scholars and practitioners to partner together for the benefit of rural communities. The dialogue demonstrates how working directly with key stakeholders like medical providers can be both practically and intellectually fruitful when addressing complex issues like rural health and RHM.

In the fall of 2020, a US/Mexico border community received national attention because of its high number of COVID cases. Hidalgo county reported over 51,000 COVID cases in 2020 resulting in 2,200 fatalities. Rural communities in Hidalgo were uniquely precarious to the disease because of assemblages constructed by human and material interactions that displaced Latinx/e bodies to unincorporated, underdeveloped communities called colonias. Centuries of interactions between humans and material life in the region had created and sustained an ecology of harm which exploited labor of rural citizens living in colonias. These interactions and the ecology they constitute are grounded in the Rio Grande River, which separates Hidalgo County from Mexico. From its initial arrival to the Hidalgo county region 2 million years ago, the Rio Grande River has assembled together humans and material life into relationships in which human rhetoric brings ideologies and ways of being that determine the precarity of border communities in the 21st-century.

This project integrates Reproductive Justice (RJ) commitments with insights from networked misogyny to describe the digital coercion strategies of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) for people living in rural areas in the United States. Abortion access is increasingly mediated by commercial search engines (Mejova et al., 2022). The authors analyzed public CPC marketing strategy documents against data from over three hundred search queries across seven states with large rural populations. Taking Google search results as rhetorical artifacts, data reveals that states with restrictive abortion laws empower CPC search result visibility in several ways. CPCs disproportionately impact people who are the most reliant on internet mediation for abortion access—a population sharing significant overlap with people living in abortion deserts in rural areas.

Rural librarians are intermediaries between individuals and our health system. Librarians direct their patrons to health resources, assist with online tasks such as insurance enrollment, lend health equipment, and more. And yet, rural libraries and librarians are largely absent from rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship. Drawing from interviews with 11 rural librarians in nine states, we discovered that librarians leverage two kairotic openings for health communication: response and invitation. They succeed via three kairotic strategies: appropriateness, propriety, and opportunity. Librarians serving rural areas eschew simplistic ideographs around digital access and urge us to consider the meaning of mental health in rural America. Librarians are powerful intermediaries because they build trust through repeated conversations and a willingness to help patrons solve their problems. Our health system should recognize, celebrate, and utilize the rural library system to better serve patients.

This paper investigates the multi-faceted and ambiguous metaphorical connotations of “risk” terminology in COVID-19 updates delivered by Canadian public health officers (PHOs) during the first year of the pandemic. Our study reveals diverse and conflicting configurations of risk as both a manageable and unmanageable entity, a personal possession and an external location, an attribute of people and of spaces and activities, and a spectrum of degrees that (dis)identified those at lower and higher levels of risk. We argue that this situated tangle of metaphorical meanings contributed to a broader Canadian politics of neoliberal-communitarian health governance which was premised simultaneously on the active citizen’s individual responsibility to manage risk for self and others and on the vulnerabilization of citizens designated “most at risk.” For the RHM field, our study suggests new ways of exploring the meanings and implications of “risk” language within diverse contexts of health and medical communication.

This essay investigates the contemporary association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and delinquent behavior. Long before its diagnostic appearance as ADD in the DSM III (1980), youth behavior associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity was rhetorically situated within an ecology of delinquency science which yoked these behaviors to criminality. Because rhetorics of criminality are profoundly racialized in the U.S., a close study of ADHD and delinquency must contend with the ways racial discourses have determined conceptualizations of juvenile behavior, particularly in educational contexts.  Through an analysis of two rhetorical case studies, I demonstrate how hyperactivity and restlessness were initially associated with delinquency by proponents of the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s. The same behaviors were later imbued with sinister and antisocial meanings by a white public responding to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary rhetoric of ADHD can be understood as a type of delinquency rhetoric from its inception.

Editors' Introduction to Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 8-1.

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was at war with two seemingly different enemies: the first was Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The second enemy was the yellow fever virus which wreaked havoc on the physical and economic welfare of the U.S. In this essay, I conduct a rhetorical history about how the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever was memorialized as a triumph of U.S. medicine, and how medical-military topoi are deployed to describe “conquest” over the virus. I argue that the nonhuman mosquito vector enables retroactive discussion of victory over an invisible enemy, creating rhetorical space between the realities of U.S imperialism and medical violence. This rhetorical history has consequences for how medical-military topoi continue to influence ways that the U.S. uses border control in response to pandemics, particularly those with nonhuman vectors or origins.

Using the Indiana Medical History Museum’s (IMHM) “Rehumanizing the Specimens” project as a case study, this essay explores the impact of language on rehumanizing human specimens in medical museums. The individuals represented by these specimens are often dehumanized because they are reduced to specific illnesses or injuries and/or because they are viewed as curiosities rather than representations of actual people. Further, the specimens at the IMHM were obtained from former patients of Central State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in operation from 1848 until 1994, so these individuals experienced additional dehumanization due to the stigma surrounding their mental illness diagnoses. To resist these forms of dehumanization, the IMHM launched the “Rehumanizing the Specimens” project, which used historical records and documents to develop narratives outlining the lived experiences of the 48 people represented by the specimens. Particularly, the narratives engaged rehumanizing rhetoric (Winderman & Landau, 2020) and recuperative ethos (Molloy, 2015), and I argue for the effectiveness of these rehumanizing strategies. In addition to offering suggestions for how these strategies can be adopted by other medical museums, I extend the discussion to healthcare providers, applying what was learned from the case study to the contemporary study and practice of medicine.

Children, as a result of age, social status, and developmental stage, depend upon caregivers and medical professionals to interpret health discourse. However, children have largely gone unexamined in research on visual health communication. Because children are a vulnerable audience, rhetoricians should more closely attend to texts addressing them. This article analyzes 147 children’s picture books about COVID-19. These texts draw on the rhetorical concept of identification to encourage readers to take up particular health behaviors. These texts illuminate three specific risks of using identification to instantiate health behaviors in children: failing to acknowledge material limitations on children’s agency, glossing over the risks of infection, and distorting scientific discourse. Ultimately, while the majority of the texts in our corpus articulate the need for a community-centered approach, only a handful acknowledge directly that children’s agency and power are limited. These texts, therefore, also highlight a larger issue beyond the coronavirus: the difficulty of relying on an individual health imperative in communicating public health—an inherently communal enterprise.

One of the root causes of health disparities in Louisville, Kentucky, is air pollution, a disparity rooted in the city’s history of environmental racism. Residents who engage in local environmental justice efforts face other systemic barriers, all of which intersect in the jargon-filled public notices about air pollution that circulate throughout the city. This article discusses a feminist environmental health literacy coalition formed to promote health literacy and create translations of public notices in plain language. Our preliminary theory of Air Justice maintains that health literacy is a social practice and that intersectional coalitions provide rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholars with a local approach to scholarship that mirrors the diverse and multiple situatedness of the communities in which they work.

Rhetoric about bodies, health, and medicine is conceived at the intersection of multiple discursive systems and social domains. I contend that religion remains an underexplored (and sometimes misrepresented) realm in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM)—a gap this article seeks to address. Here, I present my research on the importance of Protestantism in the invention of the premature infant as a medical figure in the United States. I show that early discourse about premature birth is shot through with Protestant rhetoric and beliefs, and I propose the term “theo-moral physiology” for the religiously informed medical orientation popularized in late 19th century medical literature about premature babies. Ultimately, I challenge RHM scholars to resist the tendency to treat the rise of American biomedicine as a fundamentally secular project by attending to the ways modern medicine has evolved in tandem with contemporary religion.

This essay reports results from a scoping study of recent rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research published in article form prior to the emergence of the subfield’s stand-alone journal, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM). Our corpus consists of 250 articles published between 2006 and 2020 across eight journals. Drawing on findings from our scoping study, we review RHM researchers’ methodological and evidential choices, which provides a baseline to which we can compare the next generation of RHM research. Such comparisons should illuminate the strides RHM has taken to improve our research’s durability, portability, and responsivity to matters of critical import. Finally, we conclude with an invitation to other researchers to continue scoping studies such as this one by adapting our analytic protocol and updating or expanding our corpus, both of which we make available to readers.

Introduction to RHM 7.4

This article draws on Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation to examine the ideology behind the language and images of a web-based video Johnson & Johnson created in 2020. The video promoted the company’s annual “Nurses Innovate QuickFire Challenge”—a grant competition for nurses’ innovations. In our analysis, we found that the video created four main discourses of care: nurses as innovators, technologies as care, nurses as heroic, ministering angels, and Johnson & Johnson as an empowerer of nurses. Building on the positive, but contested, identity of nurses as heroes during the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson’s video connected heroism with technological innovation, enacting a problematic vision of care and nursing identity that figures technological innovation as not only a responsibility but a moral obligation of nurses. Through their sponsorship of research and design work with these nurse heroes and innovators, Johnson & Johnson also bolstered its own corporate identity as a caring supporter and empowerer of nurses.

Reporting guidelines have emerged in recent years as a critical site of deliberation and intervention for stakeholders in the biomedical community. These texts have historically been used to formulate standards for quality reporting and bring consistency to processes of writing and publication; they also operate as a space in which practitioners promote values, define expectations, and coordinate action in line with established standards and practices in the field. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric and genre studies, this article examines how reporting guidelines contribute to the standardization of writing and publishing activity in biomedicine, functioning both as semi-procedural documents that take part in the “genre-ing” of published research and as public displays of and arguments for accountability that can be used to regulate the work of knowledge making over time. I conclude by discussing how rhetoricians might use reporting guidelines as a strategic locus for conceptualizing and potentially shaping research and writing activity in different areas of health and medicine.

This study aims to examine online contraception texts as a way to interrogate the intersections of identity, inclusivity, and access in contraception and reproductive health discourses. At the center of this project is the understanding that, while many contraceptive technologies are designed for and marketed towards "women" for the sole use of preventing pregnancy, the actual users of contraception and their purposes for its use are diverse and involve considerations of sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status, ability, cultural and religious norms, and access to healthcare. By examining the genre of contraception texts through systematized coding and rhetorical analysis, this study examines how the constitutive genre features of these texts do and do not recognize the diversity of users, with a particular focus on users in the trans community.

Editors' introduction to 7.3.

By 2050, almost 95% of the 300 living Indigenous languages are projected to be extinct. Before an Indigenous language goes extinct, the unique medicinal knowledge and practices within each tribe are often already eroded. Native medicine has health-promoting properties unique to aspects of Indigenous health and well-being, yet these benefits have slowly dwindled through the assimilation of Western medical systems. Simultaneously, the connection among Native language, medicine, healing, and cultural continuity is lost. Although the process of ancestral language learning is decreasing across Native tribes, emerging generations within Native tribes are still empowering themselves through the use of language. This commentary explores both a) the complex relationship among Indigenous languages and practices of Native healing, both historically and currently, and b) the processes of rhetorical survivance that are continuing across Native American communities.

In this commentary, we reflect on a study investigating how young people living with HIV navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and offer concrete methodological approaches to studying health inequity. We describe how participatory and narrative-based methods helped us develop five specific study protocols that reflected our commitments to equity in research: revising questions to account for local conditions of risk; intervening in histories of extractive research practices leveraged against communities at the margins; phrasing demographic questions to account for the complexity of identity; incorporating consent iteratively across the study; and offering incentives that were consistent with participants’ expertise of their own lived experiences. We use these reflections to further ongoing conversations about integrating equity into rhetorically inflected health research.

Building on mental health rhetoric research (MHRR), I explore how legal advocates in non-profit organizations guide survivors of domestic abuse in obtaining orders for protection (OFPs). State statutes not only dictate what a petition for an OFP must contain, but these statutes and resulting documents also reflect cultural and structural biases about domestic abuse. Through rhetorical analysis of state statutes and personal interviews with legal advocates in this inductive and qualitative study, I discovered that these advocates engage in subversive rhetorical intervention, what the advocates call “crafty” intervention. Such intervention is designed to meet the requirements of state statutes for an OFP and also provide a way for survivors to tell their stories in their own way. This intervention sets the stage for helping survivors heal from the trauma of domestic abuse, convincing judges that survivors need OFPs to stay safe, and demonstrating to state legislators that domestic abuse statutes may be too restrictive.

This study investigates infant feeding rhetoric from the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), a World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnership that prioritizes exclusive breastfeeding. The study approaches patient education materials as user documentation and analyzes the materials for kairos and metaphor. The author argued that the materials function as documentation for the birthing parent’s body operating within the system of the BFHI. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and for creating infant feeding resources that provide critical access to the healthcare system by rejecting the body-as-machine metaphor and reflecting families’ diverse situations, not just the situation of the U.S. healthcare system or BFHI.

This essay presents a rhetorical analysis of how the concept of stigma has functioned in American psychiatric discourse by tracing the concept across nearly two centuries of publications issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Specifically, I analyze how the concept of stigma circulates in discourses that seek to (re)establish psychiatry as a moral and scientific enterprise by managing discontinuities that potentially threaten this desired professional status. These discourses perpetually reconstitute psychiatry’s institutional identity through processes of emplacement, or recurrent spatiotemporal figurations that generate a sense of the present as placed in time. My analysis identifies three spatiotemporal figurations, or chronotopes, that persistently cluster around the concept of stigma as it circulates in psychiatric discourse: emergence, approach, and elevation. These chronotopes establish and maintain psychiatry’s professional identity by recursively (re)orienting the present against stigma, and toward an imminent future characterized by the fulfillment of psychiatry’s scientific and humanitarian mission.

Introduction to 7.2

Abstract: This article develops “menstrual methodologies” for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.

This essay examines how medical rhetorics helped justify the recent torrent of anti-trans legislation. Beginning with the “legitimacy wars” between psychiatry and psychology, I trace how competing disciplines established their own expertise by denying trans patients’ agency and self-knowledge. After identifying the “trans trickster” trope that emerges from these rhetorics, I trace how the trans trickster haunts arguments used to ban gender-affirming health care and sports participation for trans youth. I draw from sociologist Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” to explain how medical logics affect public perception and how those understandings loop back into medical research. The binary, linear models of gender transition established by trans medicine helped justify cisnormative policies around transgender identity, which in turn restricted further scientific inquiry such that more imaginative gender formations remain illegible. To conclude, I argue that medical paradigms work in relation with trans imagination would expand scientific explorations of human diversity, and that those understandings too could loop through public policy and perception.

This manuscript offers a critical rhetorical analysis of a multi-site, longitudinal study’s procedures in collecting and recording biomarkers. This manuscript opens new areas of exploration for the field of the rhetoric of health and medicine as the biomarker sampling for measures of stress, and resilience tie to critical rhetorical theories surrounding power and the body. The training manuals and protocols disseminated to the multi-site research team serve as rhetorical artifacts to examine questions of how the choices of biomarkers and the procedures employed to collect the samples needed to measure them are in and of themselves a production of health knowledge of the bodies and identities of transgender and gender diverse people. This manuscript presents an investigation of the processes of biomarker sample collection in conjunction with how the biomarkers are conceptualized as a means of deconstructing hegemonic assertions of gender and health normality.

Introduction to Queer and Trans Health Justice: A Special Issue of RHM