Research

As a rhetorician, I am trained to study the relations between different elements or aspects of a communicative situation: text and context, speaker and audience, public and private, and so on. However, as our understanding of rhetoric continues to evolve toward more embodied models of what it means to persuade or be persuaded, I find it increasingly important to approach rhetorical action as a simultaneously material and semiotic phenomenon. That is, persuasion is a visceral force that both structures and is structured by our environments and our experiences. My approach to studying persuasion as a material-semiotic force, then, emphasizes the representation of visceral, embodied experiences for the purposes of circulating, interpreting, and intervening into them. The ultimate objects of my research are the systems that articulate ordinary life within knowledge-building (and vice versa), what may be called biopolitical systems in the sense of the ancient Greek word for human, mortal, political life: bios. My participation in rhetorics of health and medicine, in particular the rhetorics of drugs and psychiatry, as well as transgender and queer rhetorics, is driven by this interest in elucidating the force of persuasion within the systems that structure and shape our visceral lives—not in order to condemn that persuasion but rather in order to discover its ethical and political potential.

In my dissertation, Persuasive Substances: Transdisciplinary Rhetorics of Drugs and Recovery, I analyze two historical cases that stretch between spiritual movements, the discipline of psychiatry, and public responses to drug use and alcoholism. This project furthers recent work in rhetorics of health and medicine that pursues new understandings of knowledge and evidence extending from a material-semiotic model of persuasion. I extend this line of research into an area—drug effects, addiction medicine, and recovery movements—that complicates deeply-rooted assumptions that persuasion either transcends the plane of material force or is wholly reducible to it. I argue that disciplinary knowledges of psuche (mind, soul, life), pharmakon (drug, poison, cure), and the interactions between them must admit a notion of shared immaterial force, imbricated in material life, that allows persuasion (as well as healing and recovery) to occur. Beyond my dissertation project, I plan to continue my work in rhetorics of drugs and recovery by studying figurations of the brain as evidence of internal affective states in contemporary addiction medicine. This will extend recent work in neurorhetorics and rhetorics of science, and it will extend the arguments made in my dissertation by analyzing the rhetorical framework for describing addiction as a “brain disease,” which emerged in the period just after my case studies. Further into the future, I intend to also extend this research area into the history of alcohol as a commodity and colonizing force in North America. This will focus in particular on the emergence of the temperance movement in alliance with the women’s movement and the emergence of the Native American Church as a hybridization of Christianity and various tribes’ tradition of peyote ceremonies.

I am also advancing this rhetorical and biopolitical research agenda through work in transgender and queer rhetorics, emphasizing in particular the intersection of nonnormative sex and gender with medical and psychiatric systems. In my article “Happiness, Biopolitics, and Transmedicine’s Necessary Contradiction: Rhetorics of Normalcy and the Narratives of Gender Transition,” published in the Peitho special issue on trans rhetorics, I rhetorically analyze the epideictic rhetorics surrounding debates over access to gender reassignment care, as this has been negotiated between the medical field, popular media, and trans people themselves. I am also currently writing, for an upcoming edited collection on queer rhetorics, a chapter titled “The Stakes of Will: Persuasion and Its Aftermath in The Transformation,” in which I analyze a documentary film’s depiction a person who gives up their life as a trans woman in order to access HIV/AIDS care. This essay attends to the role that persuasion plays in trans identity, as well as the urgency of recognizing and affirming persuasion in the context of contemporary anxiety over such “detransitions.” Continuing in this vein, I have begun research for a comparative analysis of the public controversies and activist rhetorics surrounding medical intervention for children with disorders of sex development and medical intervention for transgender youth.