Queering the Desire to Die: Access Intimacy as Worldmaking for Survival.

Based on heightened suicide rates of LGBTQ+ people, in this essay I reclaim the desire to die as a queer desire in itself. This framework aims to demedicalize-and thus re-politicize-the desire to die as a "normal" response to living in societies of domination and violence against queer lives. Through this, I frame suicidal people as agentic beings who play crucial roles in systems of community healing in the face of compulsory vivation. Building on a strengths-over-deficits framing, I engage the disability justice concepts of access intimacy and care webs to explore queer relationality and worldmaking practices that offer alternative modes of living with the desire to die.

Chemistry in the mail: Stamps from around the globe and public science communication in the twentieth century.

Postage stamps are designed to convey messages that reverberate symbolically with broad swaths of the public, and their content has been employed as a window into how members of the public understand the ideas represented therein. In this rhetorical analysis, we analyze Philadelphia's Science History Institute's Witco Stamp Collection, which features 430 stamps from countries around the globe dating from 1910 to 1983, to identify how chemistry is portrayed in this ubiquitous medium. We find the vernacular of science reflected and supported by these images functions to (a) define chemistry in terms of its invisibility and abstraction; (b) uphold chemical operations as instrumental and daedal, or exceptional, in nature; and (c) delineate practitioners of chemistry as-on the whole-privileged and preternatural. Our findings reveal some of the overarching communicative tools made available to twentieth-century non-experts for articulating chemistry as an enterprise and reveal how those tools positioned chemistry in terms of values related to opacity and exclusivity.

Hysterics and Heresy: Using Dialogism to Explore the Problematics of Endometriosis Diagnosis.

Despite advances in biomedical technology, endometriosis remains a disease that is inefficiently diagnosed and treated. American women often suffer from debilitating symptoms for a decade before being diagnosed. Addressing this deficiency is crucial if women are to live well with endometriosis. Framed by relational dialectics theory 2.0, the current study analyzes women's experiences of endometriosis diagnoses via online narrative postings. Results reveal two centripetal (dominant) discourses: (a) the discourse of psycho-abnormality, and (b) the discourse of biological normality. Narrators' invocation of the discourse of psycho-abnormality disqualifies women's suffering as imagined and "all in their heads," whereas invocation of the discourse of biological normality naturalizes women's suffering as "just part of being a woman." The discourse of psycho-abnormality and the discourse of biological normality, both rooted in patriarchal influences, hinder diagnosis and subsequently treatment and rehabilitation of endometriosis. Encouragingly, a third (though marginalized) discourse emerged: the discourse of reclaiming expertise. Narrators' invocation of this discourse directly opposes the discourses of psycho-abnormality and biological normality by inciting validation of embodied knowledge in medical encounters and urging patients to enact agency in healthcare settings. This project discusses the interplay of these three discourses, and aims to improve diagnostic efficacy as a result.