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.

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.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, I explain the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one’s normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. I conclude that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities.

On March 10, 2019, 60 Minutes reported the development of a potentially life-altering gene therapy for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Despite this therapy’s potential for cure, SCD community members’ reactions ranged from skepticism to fear due to the use of deactivated HIV as a vector for transporting the corrected gene into stem cells, thus repairing the faulty gene in SCD. Using a mental models framework, we analyze how 60 Minutes attempted to explain this research and how audiences reacted on social media. Specifically, we show how 60 Minutes’ treatment of given versus new information, as well as the journalists’ failure to account for the specific audiences with the most at stake, led to misunderstandings that contributed to ongoing fear and mistrust of the scientific community. We conclude with recommendations for how journalists should approach accommodating science when that science has particular impacts on minoritized and marginalized groups.

Nine people with mental health diagnoses wrote a dialogue to discuss how we navigate our conditions and ask for accommodations within an academic setting. We cogitate on the challenges of obtaining a diagnosis, how and when we disclose, the affordances and challenges of our symptoms, seeking accommodations, and advocating for ourselves. We consider how current scholarship and other perspectives are changing the conversation about mental health in the academy. We conclude that while the 2008 revisions to the Americans with Disabilities Act have addressed necessary accommodations, that those with mental health conditions are still seeking access.

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

Analyzing media discourse around Chris Christie’s fatness and fitness for the presidency, this essay examines how stigma constrains the rhetorical resources of individuals who transgress norms of bodies, health, and ability. To do so, I extend two concepts in the rhetoric of health and medicine: rhetorical disability (challenges to ethos precipitated by stigma) and recuperative ethos (Molloy, 2015) (efforts to rebuild ethos in light of rhetorical disability). I make two interrelated claims: 1) fat stigma is rhetorically disabling in the cultural logics of the obesity epidemic, and 2) since fat stigma in this context operates as a rhetorical disability, Christie seeks to recuperate his ethos by presenting himself as a viable leader. While scholars have theorized that “rhetorical disability” is incited by stigma around mental disability (Price, 2011; Johnson, 2010; Prendergast, 2001), I show how fat stigma similarly produces a disabling rhetorical effect: as Christie works to recuperate ethos, fat is taken up as an argument about health, morality, and individual failure.