Title: Associate Professor
University: Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Email: brynasf@iup.edu
Twitter: brynasf_edu
Website: brynasiegelfiner.wordpress.com
Description of your work
I have been interested in how women are treated in healthcare settings for a long time, having grown up overweight and treated poorly by my pediatrician, suffering an autoimmune disorder for years before it was diagnosed, going through breast cancer in 2013 and again currently. I feel as if I am always a patient, and thus I am always interested in the discourse that occurs between patients and their doctors, and between patients and other patients in similar illness communities. I am currently interested in the cultural persistence of “pink” and what “red” might be able to learn from it. Put another way, people are more “aware” of breast cancer than ever (Parthasarathy, 2014); on the other hand, seven times the number of women die annually from heart disease than from breast cancer. Yet 76% of women do not know their own cholesterol, even though approximately 45% of women have cholesterol high enough to lead to heart attack or stroke (Centers for Disease Control, 2017). My research so far shows this is due (overall) to sexism, which, like “pinkwashing,” is a material reality, yet it is also a rhetorical and discursive phenomenon. In my current work, I plan to historically trace and analyze the rise of “pink” discourse parallel to the failure of “red” discourse to take hold as a cultural mainstay that transfers not only into layperson awareness but to medical practice.