Hua Wang

Ph.D. candidate

Michigan Technological University

Description of Work:

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate on the program of Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture in the Humanities Department at Michigan Tech. My research focuses on the rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication, particularly in the Chinese context. Specifically, I’m very interested in the relationships between the rhetoric of healthcare and medicine and Chinese culture and how they shape each other with the advancement of communication technologies. I’ve done some research on how Chinese medical professionals use social media to spread health and medical knowledge to improve doctor-patient relationships, which both accommodate uneven medical sources and empowers users so that they can reclaim their authority in terms of their own bodies and their healthcare; how Chinese women activists use social media to do sustainable sex education, which is changing or disturbing traditional Chinese Confucius culture on sex and sexuality. Besides, I’ve also done some research on business communication and risk communication in China.

My dissertation focuses on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app. By utilizing rhetorical analysis as a primary methodology with a focus on rhetorical agency and drawing upon technical communication and feminist rhetoric, it examines how the app uses rhetorical strategies and visual rhetoric to alternatively articulate pregnancy and mothering to empower users, how users engage with the app by writing their embodied pregnant and mothering experience into online narratives and “selling” them to generate income, and the possibilities that they assert their rhetorical agency in the context of the app. I argue that the users’ acts both respond to China’s hegemonic health and medical discourse and practice and to the patriarchal culture, and they assert their rhetorical agency politically and economically. My study expands our understanding of the rhetoric of health and medicine in an international context. It extends the conceptions of rhetorical agency by exploring how rhetorical agency can be asserted economically in a non-capitalist, non-Western context.