Introduction: This article offers an approach that we call critical collaboration —an array of theoretical commitments drawn from the authors’ embodiments and lived experiences. In making explicit the connections between authorial embodiment and the content of theory and practice, our practical models demonstrate new and varied approaches to public feminisms. We begin with a discussion of embodiment and then offer four sections—amplification rhetorics, apparent feminisms, a techné of marginality, and memetic rhetorical environments—with key takeaways to guide readers through our related-but-different approaches. Our goal in doing so is to underscore the importance of public feminisms to enacting social justice in technical and professional communication. This means recognizing our obligation to respond to unjust technical communication. Technical communication is not a utopia of inclusion and anti-racism—although some corners of the field are dedicated to those topics, to be sure. Rather, despite the social justice turn, some parts of the field still insist on objectivity, neutrality, and practicality as the touchstones for “good” technical communication. Our work here shows some of the ways in which we might resist the cultural blinders that allow such ideas to persist unabated. Drawing especially on research in rhetoric and embodiment studies, we build interdisciplinary bridges with critical race studies (including critical race feminisms), womanism, gender studies, technical communication, Black rhetorics, queer studies, cultural studies, and rhetorical genre studies, among other fields, to provide a set of practical approaches to public feminist exigencies that resist collapsing all feminisms into a single approach. We argue that drawing on embodiment to develop a multiplicity of feminist approaches and engaging in critical collaboration as those approaches evolve is a way forward that allows for more stakeholders to engage fruitfully in public feminist projects. Our hope is that readers can then imagine public feminisms as one avenue for doing the social justice work that is vital to the growth of technical and professional communication as a field.

In this introduction, we emphasize the urgency of centering bodyminds and communities whose lives and experiences have been disregarded, or viewed as disposable, in medical and technical communication. With an expansive vision of health, we set the interdisciplinary stage for authors who answer the call of multiply-marginalized scholars working in (and beyond) medical rhetorics to reimagine health-related research that centers the perspectives, experiences, and embodied realities of multiply-marginalized communities (Jones, 2020; Walton, Moore, Jones 2019).

ABSTRACT This article uses an apparent feminist approach to engage a two-part research question: First, does gender affect the frequency with which people become subjects of medical digital imaging? Second, how do the subjects of medical digital imaging become persuaded to accept this role? Engaging with medical imaging and the technical communication surrounding it as an assemblage of technical rhetorics (Frost & Eble) and thus a technology, this project shows that women are more commonly scanned as a result of social biases. Further, this article argues that the ubiquity of scanning of women’s bodies has implications for political agency and privacy and for technical communicators’ understandings of efficiency. This study is preliminary but presents compelling evidence that further research on the technical communication surrounding gender and medical imaging is necessary.

As we write this introduction, George Floyd’s body has just been laid to rest, protests in large and small cities around the world continue to call for the end of police violence, and the Minneapolis City Council has approved plans to defund the police. In addition to these social movements, Safer at Home orders have expired, and COVID-19 cases continue to spike in states across the nation. The suffering of Black and Brown communities is on display, and racial justice advocates are demanding action from non-Black folx. No longer can white supremacy maintain its silent power.

Field narratives that (re)classify technical genres as liberating for women risk supporting the notion that feminism is a completed project in technical communication scholarship. This article suggests that technical communicators reexamine the impact of past approaches to critical engagement at the intersections of gender studies and technical communication; cookbooks provide a material example. The authors illustrate how a feminist approach to cookbooks as technical/cultural artifacts can productively revise field narratives in technical communication.

This article introduces apparent feminism, which is a new approach urgently required by modern technical rhetorics. Apparent feminism provides a new kind of response that addresses current political trends that render misogyny unapparent, the ubiquity of uncritically negative responses to the term feminism, and a decline in centralized feminist work in technical communication. More specifically, it suggests that the manifestation of these trends in technical spheres requires intervention into notions of objectivity and the regimes of truth they support. Apparent feminism is a methodology that seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique of contemporary politics and technical rhetorics. It encourages a response to social justice exigencies, invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals, and makes apparent the ways in which efficient work actually depends on the existence and input of diverse audiences.

The introduction to this special issue on the rhetorics of health and medicine charts the formation of an emerging field and its importance to communication design.

This article uses the ironic delivery sites of rhetorics surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster to foreground the importance of transcultural communication in constructing risk. Whereas hegemonic entities used community centers as spaces for dissemination, local actants took up digital media. With ecocritical and ecological-economic approaches, this article uses actor-network theory and the concept of digital guerrilla media to frame risk as being produced by complex transcultural networks that take into account the importance of location.