Tristin Brynn Hooker

PhD Student/Assistant Director of Lower-Division Writing

University of Texas at Austin

Description of Work:

I am interested in the material-discursive practices that create conditions for belief: in diagnosis, disclosure, patient activism, and self-reporting. My dissertation project is focused on the construction of “rarity” and rare diagnoses in medicine. In part, this means studying the rhetoric and implications of absence: what does it mean for diagnostic structures to rely on exclusion? How do the rhetorical and material infrastructures catalyzed by such a diagnosis maintain their legitimacy? And what do patients pursue in the absence of even this kind of diagnosis? What do communities of people with rare, difficult, precarious, or absent diagnoses make of themselves and the communities they form?

In my submission for this symposium, I track what I argue is a gendered response to celebrity disclosures of a rarely-diagnosed condition. The patterns of disbelief, discrediting, and policing that followed these disclosures are revealing, in terms of what bodies and conditions are granted “legitimacy” in the digital public sphere.

Socials:

Twitter @tristinbrynn