PCOS Discourses, Symbolic Impacts, and Feminist Rhetorical Disruptions of Institutional Hegemonies

Download or read book PCOS Discourses, Symbolic Impacts, and Feminist Rhetorical Disruptions of Institutional Hegemonies written by Marissa C. McKinley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PCOS Discourses, Symbolic Impacts, and Feminist Rhetorical Disruptions of Institutional Hegemonies examines the power of hegemonic institutions and their impact on bodies, focusing on how women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) employ rhetorical strategies to resist and disrupt mass media and clinical discourses that seek to define them and their experiences. This monograph argues that through the enactment of bio-power (Foucault), digital and mass media have denied women with PCOS opportunities for autonomous subject formation, and, in turn, allowances for constructing their ontologies and epistemologies. However, by networking in participatory new media, McKinley posits, women with PCOS can reclaim their agency. To support this argument, McKinley rhetorically examines three PCOS artifacts—a television episode, an online popular culture forum, and an online health forum. This monograph bridges the personal and the academic and adds to and extends the work being done in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) on PCOS through the adoption of a unique theoretical lens (e.g., Lisa Melonçon’s performative phenomenology) and methodology (e.g., Norman K. Denzin’s Feminist Communitarian Model) and contributes to conversations surrounding femaleness, femininity, women’s health challenges, and advocacy, as located in RHM scholarship and related fields.