The editors of Present Tense enjoyed meeting potential and current authors at the recent Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference.
"Medical rhetoric, much like gender and body rhetorics, enjoys a rich interdisciplinary history and so feels at home in a journal dedicated to the rhetorical study of socially significant and timely topics. We seek to expand the field's endeavors with this special, double issue."
"Ultrasound provisions specifically exploit the cultural significance of the iconic fetal image in order to dissuade a patient from terminating her pregnancy."
"Rhetoricians of health and medicine can challenge the effectiveness of the instrumental view of persuasion entailed by the commonplaces that regulate public health, such as fact is knowledge while belief is fiction."
"In the pregnant composition teacher we see a dangerously stacked set of circumstances... Enclosed in a body that far exceeds her control, she is a microcosm for the larger system in which she must teach."
"Our findings suggest that the FDA’s deliberative procedures may more adequately capture stakeholder testimony were it to incorporate a pre-hearing event wherein all parties agree to definitions for key points."
"Wellness has become pathologized in Western culture, mapped conceptually onto a medically oriented illness model through processes that are fundamentally discursive in nature, centered on persuasion."
"We argue that abortion discourse on all sides has been too rational and, more importantly, that this rationality has been defined in a male-oriented way."
"Attending to the most ubiquitous—and hence least noticeable—metaphors within rhetorics of health and medicine can, as Judy Segal notes, shed light on the values that these terms “smuggle into” healthcare policy and practice"
"On the one hand, pain is an event or condition socially negotiated; for the same reason, the pain patient is socially constituted. On the other hand, pain is experienced individually and, in many ways, privately."
"Beginning in late the 1970s, rhetoric and composition scholars have had three primary access points from which to approach the study of medicine: canonical rhetoric, technical communication, and the rhetoric of science."
"Continuing to allow patients to be empowered with their own medical care is key, and getting to know them to see what triggers them to take care of their own needs is huge."
"Emmons’ discourse-centered approach examines the interrelationships of personhood/gender/mental health and illness and demonstrates how language shapes and reflects gendered depictions of the depressed self."
"Each of these essays explores the overlaps and tensions of disability and mothering in the context of subject positions and liminal spaces, the complex and often confusing space where the personal and social collide."
