Confronting Rhetorical Disability

Abstract

Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants' actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women's attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women's use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women's birth plans to argue that women's silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.

Who’s a Vaccine Skeptic? Framing Vaccine Hesitancy in Post-Covid News Coverage

“…within the wrong belief frame, anyone expressing any vaccine concern was, from the start, characterized as wrong, illogical, and antiscience. That is, the belief frame rendered anyone expressing vaccine concerns as "rhetorically disabled" (Owens, 2009). Owens (2009) introduced and theorized the term "rhetorical disability" to recognize how the structure and practices of hospital childbirth often silenced birthing people-pregnant people approached hospital birth with the perception that they would face a "(perceived) inability to communicate effectively due to pain, medication, an impaired mental state, or a power imbalance" (p. 249).…”

“…That is, the belief frame rendered anyone expressing vaccine concerns as "rhetorically disabled" (Owens, 2009). Owens (2009) introduced and theorized the term "rhetorical disability" to recognize how the structure and practices of hospital childbirth often silenced birthing people-pregnant people approached hospital birth with the perception that they would face a "(perceived) inability to communicate effectively due to pain, medication, an impaired mental state, or a power imbalance" (p. 249). The present study demonstrates how not just material conditions but written artifacts and the rhetorical positions they allow and foreclose can be rhetorically disabling.…”

“…Leach and Fairhead (2007) have argued that the wrong belief frame and its depiction of the prototypical anti-vaxxer as an ignorant parent neutralize a biomedical worldview by rendering anyone who questions vaccination as obviously wrong. In the wrong belief frame, anyone expressing any form of vaccine hesitancy is rhetorically disabled from the start (Owens, 2009), as their concerns cannot be heard as anything other than ignorance and error, the jabbering of a science denialist (Hausman, 2019, pp. 87-109).…”

Toward Audience Involvement

“…That discourse could take many forms involving physicians, patients, and health care information-scholarship in this area advocates an explicit rhetorical perspective. For example, RHM scholars have discussed medical genres that have proven especially complex in terms of audience, such as birth plans (Hensley Owens, 2009), forensic letters regarding child abuse (Schryer, Afros, Mian, Spafford, & Lingard, 2009), and emergency medical services documentation (Angeli, 2015). Yet few RHM scholars have directly addressed patients or family members as reading audiences of their personal health information.…”

On pairs of matrices generating matrix rings and their presentations

“…Next we prove (15). We thank Doug Hensley [6] for communicating the following argument to us. It is convenient to decrease the sets S and D k to retain only the 8-tuples with all positive entries.…”