Project MUSE®: Rhetoric of Health & Medicine - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2018) through current issue
Latest Articles: Rhetoric of Health & MedicineTWOProject MUSE®Rhetoric of Health & Medicine2573-50632573-5055Latest articles in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Tackling Rare Disease Globally
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987786
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Recently, Fernando attended a Spanish-speaking roundtable for individuals living with or caring for individuals with rare disease. At numerous times during the discussion, a tension between health literacy and translation seemed to arise. That is, while participants felt that more could be done to properly translate materials about medical treatments and pharmaceutical products into Spanish so that parents could make better informed decisions about their children’s treatment, they noted that the translated materials they already had access to had not been written for a lay Spanish-speaking audience. This forced caregivers, many of them uncertain about their English-speaking skills, to continually ask questions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallTackling Rare Disease Globally2026-04-16text/htmlen-USTackling Rare Disease Globally2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®378182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Constructing Risk at Advanced Maternal Age
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987787
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When I tell people—especially those outside of academia—that I study the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), often they ask: what exactly is that? My standard response is to explain that I am interested in how the ways we talk about health and medicine shape how we think and make decisions about health and medicine. By “we,” I mean both individuals and the culture at large, including both popular and expert medical discourse. By “talk” I mean both the claims and arguments we make (in speech and writing), but also the specific words we use. At the core of this simplified definition of RHM is the fundamental idea that rhetoric not only reflects but actively constitutes understanding, even in contexts beyond its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallWhat to Expect When You’re Not Expecting: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Constructing Risk at Advanced Maternal Age2026-04-16text/htmlen-USWhat to Expect When You’re Not Expecting: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Constructing Risk at Advanced Maternal Age2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®937202026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16To Recover is to Relearn: Techne and Eating Disorder Recovery
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987788
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“recovery—where a story’s sameness is precisely why it should be told. Your story is only useful because others have lived it and will live it again”“because how the treatment feels is often as much a part of the overall experience of a disorder as is the disorder itself ”The first time I saw my registered dietician, she asked me if I could eat a snack every day. Even better: could I try and eat two snacks every day? I felt like a child, being asked to eat snacks, and knowing, too, that I was not being asked so much as being told to eat snacks. I did not want to eat the snacks. I would later cry while eating a single plain six-inch tortilla.I have/had an eating disorder, and I am recovering. Eating disorders affect
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallTo Recover is to Relearn: Techne and Eating Disorder Recovery2026-04-16text/htmlen-USTo Recover is to Relearn: Techne and Eating Disorder Recovery2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®1633532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Psyche or Soma? An Analysis of the Medical Debates Over the Diagnosis and Treatment of “Transsexualism”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987789
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In 1969, three years after Johns Hopkins hospital began performing gender affirming surgery on trans patients, a team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) led by Drs. Richard Green and John Money produced a volume describing and explaining the most comprehensive research findings to date on the nature of transsexuality. The GIC was the premiere program in the United States answering the demands of trans patients across the country because of their advancements in gender affirming surgical techniques which were exclusively used, at that point, to normalize intersexed bodies. For the first time, gender affirming technologies were available to trans patients1 in the United States, who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallPsyche or Soma? An Analysis of the Medical Debates Over the Diagnosis and Treatment of “Transsexualism”2026-04-16text/htmlen-USPsyche or Soma? An Analysis of the Medical Debates Over the Diagnosis and Treatment of “Transsexualism”2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®1057732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Opening Keynote: Research Methods, Lyric Theory, and Genres of Believability
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987791
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I don’t know what an appropriate keynote sounds like in this moment, as federal and state governments dismantle higher education, strip funding from vulnerable communities, and target trans people, immigrants, and anyone who stands in their way. I don’t know what words can hold the magnitude of today’s problems. But I do know that every opportunity that I get—in every disciplinary and professional space, every time I get the privilege of your attention—I want to lead with this thought: we can do differently. In fact, as academics, we have a very particular privilege in that our job is to think differently—to find the edges of what we know and step beyond them.So, what follows comes from a place of . . . wanting to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallOpening Keynote: Research Methods, Lyric Theory, and Genres of Believability2026-04-16text/htmlen-USOpening Keynote: Research Methods, Lyric Theory, and Genres of Believability2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®1325422026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16A Review of Patient Sense: Rhetorical Body Work in the Age of Technology by Lillian Campbell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988595
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As healthcare increasingly unfolds through screens, sensors, and algorithms, the very nature of caregiving—the tactile, intuitive, and deeply human work of attending to bodies—faces profound transformation. Lillian Campbell’s Patient Sense: Rhetorical Body Work in the Age of Technology offers a compelling exploration of this shift, revealing how emerging technologies reconfigure clinical practice and the embodied knowledge that sustains it. Through rich ethnographic study and innovative theoretical framing, Campbell illuminates why, even amid technological change, the nuanced, rhetorical body work of healthcare providers remains irreplaceable.In Patient Sense, Campbell examines how emergent technologies across
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallA Review of Patient Sense: Rhetorical Body Work in the Age of Technology by Lillian Campbell (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USA Review of Patient Sense: Rhetorical Body Work in the Age of Technology by Lillian Campbell (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®148442026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16A Review of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care by Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988596
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Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz’s Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care intervenes into both reproductive justice (RJ) and the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). By critiquing the gender binary in pursuit of queering of reproduction, they “explore how RJ advocates, birthworkers, and TGNC parents craft spaces of radical affirmation and dignity for queer family formation” (p. 3). To do so, they trace the seeming debate between “gender specificity and gender neutrality” (p. 2) perpetuated by anti-TGNC rhetors. Then, they consider the rhetorical strategies through which activists, RJ doulas, and families continue to resist coloniality by developing enclaves of radical affirmation. Doing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallA Review of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care by Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USA Review of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care by Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®158652026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16A Review of Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness by Erin J. Rand (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988597
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Erin J. Rand’s Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness is a powerful interdisciplinary work that brings rhetorical studies into urgent conversation with queer, race, and trans theories to interrogate the politics of childhood. The book demonstrates how childhood operates as a contested rhetorical terrain through which race, gender, and sexuality are regulated, showing that the “figural child”—an imagined, innocent, often white figure—is repeatedly invoked in public discourse to enforce norms, sustain whiteness and heteronormativity, and justify harm. Across its introduction, four chapters, and conclusion, Rand traces case studies ranging from sexting prosecutions and queer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/741/image/coversmallA Review of Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness by Erin J. Rand (review)2026-04-16text/htmlen-USA Review of Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness by Erin J. Rand (review)2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®125772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16