{"id":219,"date":"2017-09-04T18:51:28","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T18:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/?page_id=219"},"modified":"2017-09-30T16:04:16","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T16:04:16","slug":"drew-holladay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/profiles\/drew-holladay\/","title":{"rendered":"Drew Holladay"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Title: <\/strong>Assistant Professor of English<\/p>\n

University: <\/strong>University of Maryland, Baltimore County<\/p>\n

Email: <\/strong>holladay@umbc.edu<\/p>\n

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

Website: <\/strong>drewholladay.wordpress.com<\/p>\n

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

My work in RHM combines methods and theories from Rhetoric, Disability Studies, and Digital Humanities to study discourses about the brain and mental health. My dissertation, \u201cArticulating the New Normal(s): Mental Disability, Medical Discourse, and Rhetorical Action,\u201d focused on informal writing on mental health discussion boards; I was especially interested in the strategies people use to argue and advocate for appropriate medical support and public understanding of their disabilities. One thread I\u2019m following from that project is the use of corpus linguistics to study the appearance of medical terms in popular discourse and science journalism. I am also interested in the effect of an increasingly potent biomedical ideology on discourses of mental health, in particular how biological explanations of brain function and behavior are taken up in psychiatric and psychological research as well as arguments in the legal and criminal justice systems, educational institutions, and government policies. Finally, I am also formulating a paper on ethics in the research of online texts that writers would consider \u201cprivate\u201d (though they are publicly searchable) and where sensitive medical or disability information is disclosed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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

The Rhetoric of Medical Biology in Resilience<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

One area of inquiry that RHM is primed to pursue is the cultural circulation of medical discourse and its use in persuasive discourses, both public and private. Given the credibility of medical discourse in American culture, public rhetors often use such discourse to bolster political, social, and academic arguments, including ones that seem, at first glance, to have little to do with the practice of medicine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this potential article, I connect disparate conceptions of medicalization and use a critical rhetorical framework to examine a documentary film that takes up biomedical explanations of trauma and stress. To begin, I will provide an overview of theories of medicalization and \u201csomaticization\u201d (Rose), the process by which people understand more parts of life to be under the jurisdiction of biomedicine, and view their own experiences in terms of the biological body (Clarke et al.; Conrad; Jenkins; Rose). Next, building on RHM scholarship (Graham; Keranen; Segal), I will explain how rhetorical theory can provide crucial insights into the social-symbolic dynamics of medicalization by identifying the circulation of persuasive encapsulations of medical knowledge. In particular, I show how medical explanations of social phenomena are employed to verify their reality; rhetors may then work to extend the implicit credibility of medical discourse to their larger argument (one which has a more explicitly social or political exigence). No matter the rhetor\u2019s intentions, the use of medical discourse to confirm the existence of a phenomenon or problem also invokes medical<\/i> interventions or solutions <\/i>related to the subject at hand; that is, if medicine can identify a problem, then medicine should be able to provide a solution. As a result, public arguments seemingly unrelated to medical practice gravitate toward medical interventions\u2014real or imagined, plausible or impossible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To illustrate these trends, I take as my centerpiece example the popular 2016 documentary film Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope<\/i>, which describes, primarily from the researchers\u2019 perspective, how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) lead to a \u201cdangerous biological condition\u201d that results in a risk of \u201cdestructive behavior and medical diseases\u201d (KPJR Films). The film heralds the \u201crecent discovery\u201d of what the scientists included call \u201ctoxic stress\u201d: a dysfunction resulting from repeated experiences of trauma that have effects on the brain, heart, lungs, and DNA. The film\u2019s family vignettes reveal in part the social context of the relevant research, yet its overall focus is clearly on the traumatized body and its biological, developmental, and medical abnormality. One tagline from Resilience<\/i> names the body as an ever-present record of trauma: \u201cthe child may not remember, but the body remembers\u201d (KPJR Films). Many scenes in Resilience<\/i> portray the process of medical research (with its attendant imaging machines, sterile facilities, and high-tech computers) that allow scientists to \u201csee\u201d toxic stress in their participants; in parallel, the film\u2019s animations of children experiencing trauma visually highlight, anatomically, the organs affected by the stress. After constructing the results of ACEs as biological, Resilience <\/i>implies that the solutions to \u201cage-old,\u201d \u201cintractable\u201d problems may be found in the application of \u201ctwenty-first century science,\u201d and presumably, the research the film documents. The problem of ACEs, and the cascading effects of toxic stress, can be resolved with instruments that are scientific, medical, and technological. Exactly how those solutions are created or implemented is yet to be seen, in Resilience<\/i> or elsewhere.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The traumatic experiences highlighted by Resilience<\/i>\u2014physical and sexual abuse, child neglect, domestic violence\u2014are decidedly social in character: they are actions, often criminal, of people against others, and each is typically addressed by social means (e.g. the criminal justice system or Child Protective Services).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The film, however, presents the trauma experienced by children as a biomedical<\/i> reality that has a scientific or technological solution. In using medical discourse as the primary lens for understanding trauma, Resilience <\/i>draws attention away from broad social interventions (such as those that involve government action) toward individual biomedical interventions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As I develop the piece, I am considering three distinct areas of significance for the theories and practices of RHM, one or all of which I can emphasize in the final version. First, RHM can track the circulation of medical discourse in a variety of public contexts and examine its use as a source of particular pieces of evidence <\/i>as well as a method to imbue an argument with scientific credibility.<\/i> Second, RHM is well-positioned to demonstrate how, when addressing issues of social inequality and violence, the uptake of biomedical explanations related to individual bodies can distract from other influential factors and individualize social problems. Finally, as Resilience <\/i>shows, privileging a medical explanation also privileges the medical expert; the body\u2019s biology tells the story of a person\u2019s trauma rather than the testimony of the individual.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Clarke, Adele E., et al. “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.” American Sociological Review<\/i> 68.2 (2003): 161-194. Print.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders<\/i>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Graham, S. Scott. \u201cAgency and the Rhetoric of Medicine: Biomedical Brain Scans and the Ontology of Fibromyalgia.\u201d Technical Communication Quarterly<\/i> 18 (2009): 376-404. Print.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jenkins, Emily. \u201cThe Politics of Knowledge: Implications for Understanding and Addressing Mental Health and Illness.\u201d Nursing Inquiry <\/i>21.1 (2014): 3-10. Web.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kera\u0308nen, Lisa. “Public Engagements with Health and Medicine.” The Journal of Medical Humanities<\/i> 35.2 (2014): 103-9. Print.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cResilience.\u201d KPJRf<\/i>ilms<\/i>.co.<\/i> KPJR Films, 2017. Web.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century<\/i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Segal, Judy Z. \u201cWhat, In Addition To Drugs, Do Pharmaceutical Ads Sell? The Rhetoric Of Pleasure In Direct-To-Consumer Advertising For Prescription Pharmaceuticals.\u201d Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine<\/i>. Ed. D. Dysart- Gale & J. Leach. 9-32. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title: Assistant Professor of English University: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Email: holladay@umbc.edu Twitter: drewholladay Website: drewholladay.wordpress.com Description of Work: My work in RHM combines methods and theories from Rhetoric, … Continue reading “Drew Holladay”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":18,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-219","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219","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=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/219\/revisions\/690"}],"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=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}