Title: Assistant Professor
University: Ohio State University
Email: whitney.69@osu.edu
Description of your work
My goal as a researcher is to make apparent what and who matters—and how they come to matter—in medical discourses. To do this, I analyze the ways textual authority sanctions knowledges about medical bodies and subjects. For the 2019 RHM Symposium, my work in progress analyzes the rhetorical and disciplinary work of the patient medical history form. The patient medical history form, I argue, shapes patient-users’ knowledge of the medical subject, both in terms of medicine as a discipline as well as the patient’s medical subjectivity.
Other projects I am working on surface implicit disciplinary values and priorities in medical writing. In a chapter I wrote for the edited collection Women’s Health Advocacy: Rhetorical Ingenuity for the 21st Century, I analyze textual representations of patients’ bodies and how these representations allow some bodies to emerge as “normal” and others as “excess.” I am also currently working on a project that mobilizes stasis theory in order to examine the different boundaries of evidence in conflicting published medical guidelines on the annual pelvic exam.