Title: Professor in Communication Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty Success in the College of Media and Communication
University: Texas Tech
Email: amy.koerber@ttu.edu
Twitter: N/A
Website: http://ttu.academia.edu/AmyKoerber
Description of Work:
Dr. Koerber’s teaching and research for the past two decades have explored various topics in health and science communication, with a particular focus on the rhetorical and political dimensions of women’s health. She has published articles on a wide array of topics in health and science communication, and her book Breast or Bottle: Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice (University of South Carolina Press, 2013) received the 2015 CCCC award in the category of Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication. Her next book, tentatively titled From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History, is forthcoming with the Penn State University Press/Rhetoric Society of America series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric (Expected publication date: May 2018).
Another current project, “Communication and Professional Success in the STEM Workplace: A Qualitative Study,” has involved interviews with fifteen professionals in STEM fields with the aim of identifying and understanding the specific communication skills that enable these professionals to succeed in academic or industry professions. Dr. Koerber is also currently involved in several interdisciplinary research projects, and an important goal in the next phase of her academic career is to work with colleagues from across the university (including the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center) on pursuing external funding to support these projects.
Symposium Submission:
The Hormonal Woman: A Critical Exploration of Expert and Public Discourses.
In a world in which women’s rights to control their bodies are increasingly under attack, questions about the connections between historical understandings of women’s brains and bodies and the newer, ostensibly progressive, understandings take on increasing significance. As I argue in The Hormonal Woman, when a politician such as Todd Akin attests publicly that a woman cannot get pregnant if she is “legitimately” raped,i it might be easy to dismiss those remarks as coming from a crack-pot politician who has no scientific credibility. And, of course, we can take some solace from the fact that Akin lost his election after those remarks went viral. But now that we are living in a new reality, we cannot afford to feel quite so comfortable about President Donald Trump’s well-documented history of public misogynistic remarks.
As I have argued, there is a danger in setting aside outrageous remarks about female embodiment—whether they are made by a crack-pot misogynistic lunatic who loses the election after making the remarks, or by a crack-pot misogynistic lunatic who wins the election after making these remarks. Donald Trump especially seems to have this rhetorical effect, in which he is so ridiculous that even those who are most opposed to his political viewpoints can sometimes laugh at his remarks. But when we look at events in the real world, and especially legislative activity at the state level, we get another powerful reminder that remarks like these are never just “mere rhetoric”—they are indicative of deeper misogynistic tendencies pervading our current daily lives. Most notable among these issues right now is reproductive rights. Although the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision established in 1973 that a woman’s right to control her body by terminating an unwanted pregnancy superseded any imagined right of the embryo or fetus involved in that pregnancy, that decision has been under attack by right-wing conservatives since the time it was made. The effect of such attacks was relatively weak throughout much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Between 2011 and 2013, however, the US witnessed a heightened anti-abortion fervor. In fact, during this three-year period, more state-level abortion restrictions were enacted than during the entire decade prior to that.ii
As I was starting to draft this chapter in early June 2016, the US Supreme Court was deciding whether the State of Texas should be allowed to uphold a law passed by the state legislature in 2013 that had temporarily closed all but thirteen of the state’s abortion clinics. Thankfully, on June 27, 2016, the Court announced its decision that this law could not be upheld because it posed an undue burden restricting women’s access to abortion.iii If the Supreme Court had upheld this law, all but eight of the state’s clinics would have been forced to shut down. Even in the situation as it existed at that time, women in some areas of the state had to travel more than 200 miles to the nearest abortion clinic—a situation that has proven difficult to change even after the Supreme Court’s decision.iv And once she arrives at the clinic, if it is located in Texas, she still has to be subjected to a condescending set of laws that require her to hear state-mandated counseling information and then undergo an ultrasound in which she is forced to listen to the fetal heartbeat, watch the images on the screen, and listen to the physician’s explanation of the images—all before waiting 24 hours to return to the clinic to have the procedure. And all of these rhetorical moves are supposedly intended to protect the woman’s health and safety.
Meanwhile, in another rhetorical situation in Texas that might seem entirely separate, adults and children are suffering real health problems because of state legislators who refuse to interfere with the oil and gas industries’ rights to pursue profit at all costs. When it comes time to consider implementing regulations that would ensure citizens’ safety from environmental and physical risks posed by the practices of the oil and gas industry, where are these state legislators who are so concerned about women’s health and safety, about preserving “life” at all costs? And if we are going to focus on fetuses, who is looking out for the women who are suffering miscarriages of wanted and intended pregnancies because of chemicals we are allowing in our environment in the name of industry and free enterprise?v The salient point of contrast between these two different rhetorical situations is that the people who run these oil and gas corporations are assumed from the outset to be rational beings, with strong minds, capable of running their companies in a manner that will protect the safety and health of Texas citizens.vi By contrast, the women who might seek abortions in Texas are not seen as having that same capacity to self-regulate, reflect, and make their own rational decisions; rather, they are rhetorically positioned as less-than-competent individuals who need the government to help ensure they will make the right decision.
These may seem like disparate issues, but they are not. If a rhetorical analysis is to be truly transdisciplinary, then scholars of science, medicine, and rhetoric must reach out and identify connections among different domains that may not appear to be related. In this case, juxtaposition of two controversies that would otherwise seem to exist far apart from each other reveals a difference between our society’s understandings of female rationality and male rationality that cannot, in any way, be accounted for in logical or empirical terms. The only way to explain this difference is by acknowledging the phenomenon that manifests itself in an endless number of rhetorical configurations throughout the eras examined in this book: configurations in which the female mind and body emerge as foreign, mysterious, or defective versions of the male mind and body.