Title: Assistant Professor of English & Humanities
University: Shawnee State University
Email: jen.bracken@gmail.com
Twitter: brackenscott
Website: N/A
Description of Work:
My research explores the rhetorical dimensions of the public debate around vaccinations, particularly the controversy surrounding vaccines and autism. I use rhetorical criticism to discover the ideologies and rhetorical strategies that different rhetors use to make their case for their side of the controversy. My current projects explore how ideologies intersect to produce a belief that vaccines cause autism and how people change their minds about vaccination.
Symposium Submission:
Intersecting Ideologies in the Vaccines-Autism Controversy
I am currently working on analysis of the vaccines-autism controversy in which I explore how multiple ideologies intersect to produce the belief in a link between vaccines and autism. Those who believe in such a link tend to lean on critiques of capitalism and patriarchy to position themselves as members of a dominated class. They emphasize the profit-driven nature of the pharmaceutical industry and argue that (male-dominated) mainstream medicine has dismissed parents’ (especially mothers’) concerns about vaccine safety. But an unvaccinated child in the United States is unlikely to be a member of an underprivileged group; in fact, most unvaccinated children are white and middle- or upper-middle-class—hardly an underprivileged group in the U.S. today. Furthermore, the critiques of capitalism and patriarchy offered by vaccine skeptics are undermined by their ready acceptance of profit-based companies selling products and services that promise to “cure” autism while lacking evidence in support of their claims, as well as their reliance on the notion that all women carry within them a finely honed “mommy instinct.”
My analysis seeks to peel back the veneer of liberal ideology among vaccine skeptics and investigate the fundamentally conservative core beneath it: a series of intersecting and interwoven individualist, ableist, white supremacist, imperialist ideologies. Working together, these ideologies permit otherwise well-meaning people to behave and believe in ways that undermine their responsibility to the global community and dehumanize those who do not share their status.
To give an example illustrating the kinds of intersections I wish to explore in my analysis, what follows is an outline of how individualism intersects with these other ideologies to produce a vaccine-resistant point of view. First, individualism on its own places a higher value on the individual’s wellbeing over the wellbeing of the community, and often fails to see the relationship between the wellbeing of one’s community and one’s own wellbeing. On its own, this worldview—if strongly held—may be adequate to justify vaccine refusal. But if we consider how individualism intersects with ableism, we can see another rationale for vaccine refusal emerge. Individualism intersects with ableism to devalue those who are more dependent upon others due to a physical or cognitive disability, for individualism values independence. Individualism intersects with capitalism and ableism by emphasizing the value of those who can contribute to society through the workforce, and painting as lazy and worthless those who cannot contribute as much due to age, ability, or illness. Individualism intersects with patriarchy by emphasizing the achievement of the individual male; as boys are typically diagnosed with autism more frequently than girls, it is this achievement of individual white males that is most threatened if vaccines cause autism. Individualism intersects with white supremacy by ignoring the role of privilege in individual achievement and wellbeing, leading individuals to believe that it is their own merit that has kept them healthy and successful; they therefore feel no responsibility to protect others, for white supremacy allows them to believe that no one has ever protected them.
Although the analysis I propose here is complex and overlapping, I argue that there is much value in exploring how ideologies align to produce particular beliefs. A single explanation of a phenomenon is likely to be unsatisfactory, so it stands to reason that we ought to examine the interplay between ideologies to see how they inform, shape, and reinforce one another—see, for example, hooks’s indictment of white supremacist capitalist (and, she later adds, imperialist) patriarchy. With implications for health communication, public health policy, and education, my hope is that this research would offer useful insights into vaccine refusal.