Billie R. Tadros (she/her/hers or they/them/theirs)

Assistant Professor, Department of English & Theatre/Associate Faculty, Women’s & Gender Studies Program/Director, Health Humanities Concentration

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, and in 2016 I sought the narratives of other injured women runners in interviews and surveys that became the basis for my doctoral dissertation. I’ve since used this data to 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’ narrative agency and materially impacting their recovery. Continuing work with this data, I am now developing a definition of the erotics of running and examining the ways that some women runners’ gendered and erotic performances and understandings of their identities are implicated in their athletic performance. (This work was the subject of my working paper for the RHM 2020 Symposium.)

For this year’s symposium I’m working on a draft of an article in which I explore the methodological possibilities and limitations of using the Listening Guide (Gilligan et al.), and specifically, “I poems” (e.g., Gilligan et al., Inckle, Koelsch), in working with data gathered in surveys and interviews with other woman-identified runners who sustained traumatic injuries. (I-poems constitute the second step in the Listening Guide methodology; the researcher extracts from an interview transcript each of a participant’s first-person “I” statements, which include the first-person pronoun “I,” the subject’s verb, and other accompanying words deemed essential. The aim of constructing I-poems is to focus on the participant’s first-person voice, and, specifically, on the way the participant talks about herself/themself/himself.) I demonstrate and reflect on my application of the Listening Guide in analyzing one interview transcript and then offer considerations of the ethics and efficacy of this methodology for autoethnographic scholarship, for scholarship positioned at the intersections of gender and ability, and for RHM scholarship more broadly.

My poetics engages many of the same concerns represented in my scholarship. My most recent book of poems Graft Fixation (Gold Wake Press, 2020—winner of the press’s 2019 open reading period) 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, for which I currently serve as the program director.

Contact: billie.tadros@scranton.edu | @BillieRTadros (Twitter) | http://www.BillieRTadros.com