Title: Associate Professor, Director of Composition
University: University of New Hampshire
Email: c.beemer@unh.edu
Description of your work
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, suddenly, my work in early modern women’s rhetoric and technical writing took a back seat to my new obsession. I joined an online community dedicated to breast cancer support. As I delved deeply into this community, I came to realize that it functions beyond merely support—it is a site of feminist praxis; it is feminist theory in action. Instead of searching through traditional archives in libraries, here I witnessed a living archive, one that is added to constantly by a growing 24 hour, 7 day a week. I found a complicated, imperfect community of writers that challenged the medical system by valuing the experiential knowledge of patients and establishing an archive of shared information in an asynchronous, public space. This unique rhetorical space full of first-hand accounts of cancer treatment forms an instructive avenue of inquiry in medical care and creates a virtual, global community of authentic women writers contributing to wellness through shared experience, language, support, advice, and humor. Far from a utopia, this community has a population profound in what they share and yet as vastly different as any international group. My analysis explores the complicated rhetoric of a changing healthcare system that includes challenges to medical paternalism in online spaces, and in particular by breast cancer patients as women (and a few men) come together—to have intimate—yet public—conversations in ways that were impossible before the popularity of online support groups.
Clear Margins: Breast Cancer and the Rhetoric of the Online Peer-to-Peer Healthcare Community, is arranged into five chapters of rhetorical analysis with five narrative interchapters. Clear Margins introduces readers to the online breast cancer support community, identifies strategies of communication in this space; and intersects rhetorics of health and medicine, women’s rhetoric, disability studies, and even theories of patient care in the emergent fields of narrative medicine and peer-to-peer healthcare.