Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness

Abstract

"In Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness, Molly Margaret Kessler focuses on ostomies and gastrointestinal conditions to show how stigma is nearly as central to living with chronic conditions as the conditions themselves. Drawing on a multi-year study that includes participant observations, interviews, and rhetorical engagement with public health campaigns, blogs, social media posts, and news articles, Stigma Stories advocates for a rhetorical praxiographic approach that is attuned to the rhetorical processes, experiences, and practices in which stigma is enacted or countered. Engaging interdisciplinary conversations from the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, Kessler takes an innovative look at how stigma functions on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. In doing so, Kessler reveals how stories and lived experiences have much to teach us not only about how stigma functions but also about how it can be dismantled"-- "Building on previous research into stigma within rhetoric and blending it with health communication, disability studies, narrative medicine, and sociology, this book takes a rhetorical approach to studying stigma as emergent within the lived experiences of stigmatized chronic conditions-specifically chronic gastrointestinal conditions"-- Studying stigma: a rhetorical approach to stories and lived experience ; Rhetoric of stories, stigma, lived experiences ; Studying stigma stories ; Preview of chapters -- Listening for stigma: praxiographic solutions and stigma in practice ; Critiques of stigma research ; Praxiographic solutions ; Stigma in practice ; An ethical case for engaging stigma praxiographically -- Staging stigma: ostomies as worst-case scenarios ; Leaks, stigma, and visceral publics ; Worst-case scenarios: ostomies in public health campaigns ; Ostomies on TV: fear and disgust in popular media ; Staging stigma through fear ; Credibility enhanced through stigma ; Conclusion -- Protesting stigma: disruptive stories, temporality, and ostomies as lifesavers ; Temporality, disability, and progressions of experience ; Rejecting compulsory nostalgia: disruptive ostomy stories as protest ; Disruptive stories, disruptive timelines ; Complicating a two-sided story ; Conclusion -- Managing stigma: visual acts of resistance ; Normalcy, norms, and the impossibility of normalization ; Displaying ostomies and soliciting stares ; Visual rewards and risks: sexualizing disability ; Showing off ostomies and arriving at the destination of normal ; Conclusion -- Thinking with stories: toward stigma interventions ; The value of a praxiographic approach to stories ; Interventional insights ; Conducting entangled research.