Women's Health Advocacy: Rhetorical Ingenuity for the 21st Century [Hardcover]

Womens Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuitythe creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when womens health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in womens health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and womens studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.

Introduction

Advocate
Donna Laux

1. Writing My Body, Writing My Health: A Rhetorical Autoethnography
Kim Hensley Owens

2. Temporal Disruptions: Illness Narratives Before and After Web 2.0
Ann Wallace

3.Analyzing PCOS Discourses: Strategies for Unpacking Chronic Illness and Taking Action
Marissa McKinley

4.Rhetorics of Empowerment for Managing Lupus Pain: Patient-to-Patient Knowledge Sharing in Online Health Forums
Cynthia Pengilly

5. Rhetorics of Self-Disclosure: A Feminist Framework for Infertility Activism
Maria Novotny and&aml3+