Title: Assistant Professor
University: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Email: ewinderm@umn.edu
Twitter: @emilywinderman
Description of your work
My research is united by its focus on historical and contemporary problematics of women’s reproductive issues to discover the continuities and ruptures in public feeling towards gendered healthcare. This research program forms a body of scholarly work that coheres around a central premise: emotions are a fundamental way that reproductive communities form their collective identities. Rather than assume that emotions are simply individuated feelings, my research asserts instead that emotions are rhetorical. In other words, emotions can be publicly articulated and function to define the contours of collectives and their messages that shape how we view health-related issues. My focus on the ancient rhetorical concept of pathos, in particular, calls us to consider the ways that emotions can be goaded to amplify and diminish in public discourses. As a rhetorical scholar of health and medicine, I trace public emotions through a variety of issues related to women’s reproductive capacities including pre-natal decision-making, birthing practices, and their relationship to popular culture and political advocacy.