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Press, Sara Victoria

University of British Columbia

My dissertation offers an interdisciplinary analysis of settler-colonial rhetorics of health and illness in English-speaking Canada and the United States, demonstrating how “otherness” and “abnormality” are often amplified or misrepresented in relation to a presumed norm of able-bodied white health. By interrogating specific instances of systemic racism and biases in medical practice and pedagogy from the early twentieth century to present, I illuminate inequalities in North American society that remain significant obstacles to healthcare. Diagnosing these disparities allows me to identify and challenge rhetorics of health and citizenship, while rendering clearer the health privileges associated with whiteness. What bodies are read as normal? How do medical norms create barriers to equitable healthcare? And how can we decouple these medical norms from institutionalized whiteness? My research is both problem- and place-based: I focus on Canada and the US due to their geographical proximity, their settler-colonial legacies, and the white supremacy that has characterized both nations’ public policies. While politics, demographics, and healthcare models vary significantly between Canada and the US, I highlight some of the transnational strategies—involving eugenics, race science, physical education programs for national fitness, and print media propaganda—through which medical and governmental authorities have independently and collectively conflated white supremacist norms with health and citizenship. My dissertation chapters build upon historical, rhetorical, and literary analyses. I deploy multidisciplinary methodologies to explore “normality” and standardization from various vantage points, and I consider the ways in which these ideas move across different discursive contexts. The rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) analyzes the impact of language and persuasion in health communication, medical encounters, and scientific writing. Combining RHM with postcolonial theory allows me to examine power dynamics that impact medical encounters in settler-colonial states. I draw on literary analysis to show how fiction and non-fiction can offer insights into the lives of marginalized people and provide counternarratives that critique the ostensible objectivity of scientific and medical discourses. Historicizing the changing conceptions of health and normality helps me contextualize and problematize contemporary medical practices as I examine the stereotypes and rhetorical subtexts of Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) in medical schools.

Text

2023-01-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83585

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/