Queer Ethics and Being

This project's subject matter is the rhetoric and ethics of transgender medical literacies, particularly in online spaces. Trans* individuals in many countries including the United States face considerable barriers in accessing affordable and comfortable healthcare, especially for gender-transition care. Even if insurance offers coverage, gender-transition care can entail burdensome travel to locate qualified, let alone sympathetic medical practitioners and lengthy surgery waiting lists.

In response, many trans* people have sought methods of administering their own regimen of hormone replacement therapy (or HRT), which is a process increasingly made possible through international pharmaceutical websites. Far from an ad hoc process, trans* individuals have employed anonymous online communities and social media to produce a wide range of user-generated (DIY) instruction sets that provide directions on obtaining, administering, and monitoring gender affirming hormone therapy (GAHT).

Studying the ethics and rhetoric of these texts is important for several reasons. First, trans* communities are underrepresented research populations even among medical researchers and practitioners. In a statement aimed at medical researchers and practitioners across multiple disciplines, White Hughto et al. (2017) tellingly commented in a summary of existing work in this area: “Future research would also benefit from examining the role of health literacy in access to transition-related care for transgender patient populations” (p. 115). Bauer et al. (2014) noted that healthcare for trans individuals is remarkable in its institutional and informational erasures, erasures that produce a system where a trans individual is “an anomaly” (p. 348), a disruption.

In this project, I envision a more fundamental re-imagining of what “queer” means with regard to “rhetoric,” and “technological agency.” Queer beings do not exist—let alone write—as fully finished beings, but always/already exist with respect to a kind of kinetic potential to become something different. In turn, the technologies that they use to form non-institutional medical knowledges simultaneously alter the content as well as the broader terrain of use. This project suggests that queer rhetorical agency and its attendant ethics requires a cross-disciplinary approach that combines methodologies from technical communication, medical rhetoric, material rhetorics, and queer and transgender theory. I develop this framework by exploring new materialist approaches to technological agency in the work of the philosopher of science, Karen Barad. Using a new materialist lens to explore a broad array of queer approaches can highlight how trans* individuals share DIY medical communication in social media spaces.

In researching material rhetorics, medical literacy, and technical communication at the intersection of technological agency, online spaces, and trans* healthcare, I employ analytical lenses of transgender theory, queer theory, rhetorical theory, and tactical technical communication. This project attends to two intersecting/ interlocking modalities of power: healthcare and sexuality to both analyze the tactics trans* people use to find, share, and operationalize effective medical information, and to draw attention to the often-enormous barriers to care that trans* people face.

Academic Awards Related to This Project

(2022) Article of the Year, Association of the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (“Health and wellness as resistance”)
(2021) CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award, Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication (“Queering”)
(2020) The Nell Ann Pickett Award, given each year to the best article published in the ATTW journal (Technical Communication Quarterly) (“Queering…”)