{"id":199,"date":"2017-09-04T18:47:39","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T18:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/?page_id=199"},"modified":"2018-05-31T14:41:42","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T14:41:42","slug":"sara-dicaglio","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/profiles\/sara-dicaglio\/","title":{"rendered":"Sara DiCaglio"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SaraTitle: <\/strong>Instructional Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Multi-Section Writing Courses<\/p>\n

University: <\/strong>Texas A&M University<\/p>\n

Email: <\/strong>sara.dicaglio@gmail.com<\/p>\n

Twitter: <\/strong>sdicag<\/p>\n

Website: <\/strong>http:\/\/www.saradicaglio.com<\/p>\n

Description of Work:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I study women\u2019s reproductive health, particularly discourses around pregnancy loss. I hold a dual PhD in English and Women\u2019s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and that intersectional training is deeply important to my conceptions of myself as a scholar\u2014no matter what I\u2019m looking at, I\u2019m examining it through a feminist lens that\u2019s informed by rhetoric and by feminist science studies.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The project I\u2019m working on for this symposium focuses on what I call \u201chormone communities.\u201d It draws from work I did for my dissertation that ended up splitting off as I began thinking in terms of books. Here, I\u2019m interested in the hormone as a rhetorical subject, object, and actor in relation to larger communities. How do we talk about and think about hormones? How do we think about human communities that come together around hormones (for example, online communities looking at pregnancy test results together)? How do we think about human-technological relationships around hormones (fertility trackers)? And how do we understand the rhetorical force of the hormone itself, either in terms of endocrine disruption or even in terms of medication that crosses species lines (horse \/ human menopause medication, etc)? This work intersects with my previous research on pregnancy loss, but is also deeply interested in how people, objects, technologies, and molecules come together to form communities of effects, change, and even literacy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Symposium Submission:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Communities of Signals: Hormone Communities, Molecular <\/b>Rhetorics<\/b>, and the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This project, tentatively entitled Communities of Signals,<\/i> examines what I call hormone communities<\/i> as rhetorical phenomena. We are porous, interconnected creatures; hormones affect our sense of selves, our bodily functions, our relationships, and our ecological wellbeing. By examining hormone communities through rhetorical, medical, and cellular entanglements, I argue that attention to these communities can enliven our understanding of community as ecological, embodied structures\u2014sometimes chosen, sometimes not\u2014that occur on multiple scales. This project is interested in how hormones create, extend, reflect, and alter new rhetorical communities and communities of patients.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I define hormone communities<\/i> as the communities and relations that are formed within and with hormones, either at the molecular scale or at the human-molecule scale\u00a0 Hormone communities surround and compose us\u2014we might think about studies of the effects of pheromones on a crowd (Brennan), the use of mare urine to create estrogen replacement medicine for post-menopausal women, oxytocin cycles that make breastfeeding possible, endocrine disrupters in environmental pollutants, or even fertility trackers. These relationships cross many borders and boundaries; they are at times human-human, at times interspecies, at times transcorporeal (Alaimo), and at times technological. They represent attempts to observe, track, intervene, perfect, and understand these hormonal relations.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Much of the work on hormones has been done in the fields of science and technology studies and feminist science studies. For example, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that the concept of the hormonal body, particularly as tied to sex, is the result of the historical machinations of science\u2014we have come to take for granted a way of understanding the body that is itself partial, the result of cultural forces and structural norms. Elsewhere, scholars like Celia Roberts, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Jean-Paul Gaudilliere have similarly explored the creation of what Gaudilliere refers to as a \u201cmolecular endocrine style of thought\u201d\u2014a hormone based understanding of bodies that leads to the pathologizing of conditions like menopause that can be \u201ctreated\u201d with hormonal therapy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But hormones are themselves importantly rhetorical, though easy to overlook as forms of communication and community. This project builds on the interdisciplinary framework used by S. Scott Graham in The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry<\/i>, who argues that \u201crhetoric and STS need each other\u201d (8), particularly as both fields are currently working to develop \u201cnew materialist approaches to science, technology, and medicine\u201d (13). I approach this project as a scholar who is seated in both feminist science studies and rhetoric, and thus this project is largely interested in examining the impact of this larger interdisciplinary framework for the rhetoric of health and medicine through its examination of the hormone. Who speaks for the hormone, and who does the hormone speak to? How has the hormone itself been framed rhetorically? How have hormones led to the formation of human communities, particularly in terms of women\u2019s and queer health communities? And how might work in rhetoric on questions that intersect with hormones and communities built around hormones (Seigal, Koerber, Wells, etc) work to inform our understanding of these communities?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This project considers the rhetorical possibilities of hormone communities in order to suggest a new direction for the rhetoric of health and medicine, one in which our increasing interest in the non-human and the new materialist begins to take seriously the huge variety of molecular and biological forms of communication and rhetoric. By considering the shifting scales of the hormone as rhetorical object, I suggest that rhetoric may provide a helpful lens through which to understand the communal and communicative nature of the hormone community. Moreover, for theorists of the rhetoric of health and medicine, this project allows us to think fruitfully about the way that our transcorporeal connections may shape our relationships to our own bodies, to larger medical structures, and to one another. By reseating the hormone at the center of these communities and communications, this project imagines that we might determine a new way of relating our bodies to ourselves and ourselves to knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. <\/i>Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect.<\/i> Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.<\/i> Basic Books. New York, 2000\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gaudilliere, Jean Paul. \u201cGenesis and Dvelopment of a Biomedical Object: Styles of Thought, Styles of Work and the History of the Sex Steroids.\u201d Studies in History and Philosophy of Science <\/i>35, 525-43.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Graham, S. Scott. The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Koerber, Amy.\u202fBreast or Bottle<\/i>?:<\/i> Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice<\/i>. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mol, Annemarie.\u202fThe Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice<\/i>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oudshoorn, Nelly. Beyond the Natural Body: <\/i>An Archaeology<\/i> of Sex Hormones. <\/i>London: Routledge Press, 1994.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Roberts, Celia. Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine, and Feminism. <\/i>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Seigel, Marika.\u202fThe Rhetoric of Pregnancy<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wells, Susan. Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing<\/i>. Palo Alto: Stanford, 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title: Instructional Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Multi-Section Writing Courses University: Texas A&M University Email: sara.dicaglio@gmail.com Twitter: sdicag Website: http:\/\/www.saradicaglio.com Description of Work: I study women\u2019s reproductive health, … Continue reading “Sara DiCaglio”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-199","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":776,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/199\/revisions\/776"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}