Title: Instructor
University: Florida Atlantic University
Email: msobnosky@fau.edu
Description of your work
I became interested in the rhetoric surrounding health and medical issues when I started looking at HIV activist groups. In particular I was interested in how HIV activists were able to establish themselves as legitimate participants in decisionmaking on HIV research and public policy. I have since pursued related issues that look at medical activism and health social movements. I am particularly interested in the women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which in many way provides the substance of much contemporary medical activism. I am also interested in the ways that medical discourse represents the people it serves. My current research examines how women are represented in gynecology texts in gynecology textbooks and other medical writings during the “golden age” of American medicine in the 20th century. This project also draws on the growing body of literature on ignorance as a communication strategy. Recent work in a variety of disciplines has explored the ways that ignorance can be fostered, circulated, and deployed in discourses of power and resistance. Analysis of medical texts reveals certain types of ignorance at work in the representations of women in medical discourse, resulting in negative views of women, misunderstandings of women’s health issues, and in some cases mistreatment of women by medical practitioners.