Title: Associate Professor
University: Vanderbilt University
Email: jeffrey.a.bennett@vanderbilt.edu; jeff.bennett@vanderbilt.edu
Twitter: @jeffreyabennett
Description of your work
I’m a rhetorical scholar whose work in the context of health and medicine is informed by queer theory, cultural studies, and cognate fields. I’m currently working on a new project about the rhetorical dynamics of the phrase “pre-existing conditions.” I’m interested in the ways the term has evolved from a bureaucratic means of denying people healthcare to one that has animated activist politics. I argue that “pre-existing conditions” has moved from a rhetoric of risk to a rhetoric of access and that discursive shift has empowered communities that seek to preserve patient protections.
The essay I’m working on for this conference is one of the case studies. On June 20, 2005, approximately two dozen residents from the state of Tennessee stormed the office of governor Phil Bredesen. Among their ranks were people with a variety of illnesses, chronic conditions, and disabilities. These demonstrators gathered at the state capitol to protest cuts to TennCare, the state Medicaid program that sought to expand coverage to residents who were uninsured or uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. The protestors remained in the capitol for 75 days, making it the longest indoor sit-in in U.S. history.
This paper engages the sit-in to scrutinize the biopolitical relationship between embodied justice and the necessity of rhetorical abstraction to forge identification across a range of bodies to incite collective action. I argue that the demonstrators reconfigured reductive schemas of risk using corporeal practices of resistance to actualize an ethos of access. This so-called cripistemology, one that places disability and illness at the center of epistemological knowledge creation, reconceptualizes abstractions such as “risk” by questioning the norms that perpetuate onerous hierarchies of wellness. In short, the sit-in functioned as a rhetorical modality of access.