Main description:

Women's Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuity-the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when women's health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in women's health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and women's studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.

Contents:

Introduction

Jamie White-Farnham and Cathryn Molloy

Section 1: Rhetorics of Self

Advocate
Donna Laux

1. Writing My Body, Writing My Health: A Rhetorical Autoethnography
Kim Hensley Owens

2. Temporal Disruptions: Illness Narratives Before and After Web 2.0
Ann Wallace

3.Analyzing PCOS Discourses: Strategies for Unpacking Chronic Illness and Taking Action
Marissa McKinley

4.Rhetorics of Empowerment for Managing Lupus Pain: Patient-to-Patient Knowledge Sharing in Online Health Forums
Cynthia Pengilly

5. Rhetorics of Self-Disclosure: A Feminist Framework for Infertility Activism
Maria Novotny and Lori Beth De Hertogh

Section 2: Rhetorics of/and the Patient

Bridging the Gap in Care for Women
Janeen Qadri

6. Making Bodies Matter: Norms and Excesses in the Well-Woman Visit
Kelly Whitney

7. Doula Advocacy: Strategies for Consent in Labor and Delivery
Sheri Rysdam

8. Gendered Responsibility: A Critique of HPV Vaccine Advertisements, 2006-2016
Erin Fitzgerald

9. "Pregnant? You Need a Flu Shot!": Safety and Danger in Medical Discourses of Maternal Immunization
Lisa M. DeTora and Jennifer A. Malkowski

10. "Most Doctors Will Just Say 'Stop running'": Women Runners' Narratives, Agency, and Identity
Billie R. Tadros

Section 3: Rhetorics of Advocacy

Fighting Cancer from Every Angle
April Cabral

11.Reframing Efficiency Through Usability: The Code and Baby-Friendly USA
Oriana Gilson

12. "You Have to Be Your Own Advocate": Patient Self-Advocacy as a Coping Mechanism for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk
Marleah Dean

13. Activism by Accuracy: Women's Health and Hormonal Birth Control
Kristin Marie Bivens, Kirsti Cole, and Amy Koerber

14. Altering Imaginaries and Demanding Treatment: Women's AIDS Activism in Toronto, 1980s-1990s
Janna Klostermann

15. Costly Expedience: Reproductive Rights and Responses to Slut Shaming
Laurie McMillan

Afterword - "The Rhetorician [of Health and Medicine] as Agent of Social Change": Activism for the Whole Woman's Body
Bryna Siegel Finer