Billie Tadros

Assistant Professor, Department of English & Theatre; Affiliated Faculty, Women’s & Gender Studies Program

The University of Scranton

Description of Work:

My work in the rhetorics of health and medicine represents my personal/professional identities as poet, scholar, teacher, and (ex-)runner. In 2014 I sustained traumatic injuries in a motor vehicle accident that disrupted my identity as a marathon runner. In 2016 I sought the narratives of other injured women runners in interviews and surveys that became the basis for my doctoral dissertation. From that initial work I recently published a book chapter in Women’s Health Advocacy: Rhetorical Ingenuity for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2020), in which I argue that doctors’ gendered diagnoses and prognoses for injured women runners represent narratives that often assign patients limited scripts for recovery based on essentialized and culturally reproduced assumptions about femininity that conflate biological sex with gender and ultimately risk disabling patients’ textual agency and materially impacting their recovery. Continuing work with this data, I am now interested in articulating a definition of the erotics of running and examining the ways that some women runners’ gendered and erotic performances and understandings of their identity are implicated in their athletic performance. Additionally, I am examining the possibilities and limitations of personal narrative in restoring and re-storying embodied subjects in the wake of such athletic/erotic injury. My poetics engages many of the same concerns. My book Graft Fixation (Gold Wake Press, 2021) performs the texts of injury, using my own accident and hospital reports, medical correspondence, Facebook posts, and MRI images as source texts. And my working manuscript Was Femoral, Was Femme Moral mythologizes my own queer experiences of running and of injury and grief through a character named “Was.”

As a faculty member at The University of Scranton, I model theorizing bodies and embodied experiences in literature courses in the health humanities and am working with a team of faculty to develop a health humanities concentration.