Kaila Prins
Title: Graduate Student
University: UW-Madison
Description of Work:
As a second year graduate student of rhetoric, I am currently exploring what I call “Diets, Dogma, and Dollars”: the intersections of the rhetoric of health and medicine, the rhetoric of religion, and the rhetoric of marketing, specifically as they play out in, on, and across the bodies of health coaches and personal trainers (and their followers) on the internet. As person who has both recovered from an eating disorder (leaving more than one cult of wellness in the process) and renounced online health coaching and personal training, I have a personal investment in understanding how the rhetoric of wellness becomes embodied through performative engagement with social media and blogs. My research is interdisciplinary: to contextualize online influence’s impact on the body, I look to feminist media studies, masculinity studies, queer theory, performance studies, sociology, religion, marketing, and economics, in addition to the rhetoric of health and medicine. While I look at online wellness influence in general, I am currently focused on the rhetorical construction, transmission, and contraction of “eating disorders” like orthorexia in online spaces. I also spent two and a half years conducting interviews, writing, and recording the first season of the “Your Body, Your Brand” podcast (bodybrandpod.com) to better understand the economic and cultural reasons why women drop out of the workforce to become yoga teachers and health coaches. I am now in the process of working on season two, where I will dig deeper into the ways in which both influencers and their followers allow the rhetoric of marketing to become embodied.
Socials:
Podcast: bodybrandpod.com
Twitter @performingwoman