Amy Vidali

Rhetorical Hiccups: Disability Disclosure in Letters of Recommendation

This article positions letters of recommendation as important and troubling indicators of faculty beliefs about diversity and access in higher education. I focus on the disclosure of disability, both by examining the history of disclosing stigmatized difference and by analyzing five letters of recommendation for an aspiring graduate student with a traumatic brain injury. I suggest that faculty must revise their letter-writing practices and engage in a type of rhetorical forecasting that questions well-intentioned disclosures of difference and imagines how various letters form a composite sketch of a candidate.

Hysterical Again: The Gastrointestinal Woman in Medical Discourse

This article suggests increased attention to how medical discourses of gastrointestinal (GI) disorder and distress are fraught with social assumptions and consequences by examining nineteenth-century and contemporary medical texts focused on chronic constipation and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I suggest that these medical discourses present what I call the “gastrointestinal woman,” who is characterized as having unjustified anxiety and is to blame for her condition. My approach to understanding, and ultimately revising, the representation of the gastrointestinal woman is shaped by disability studies scholarship, which encourages intervention in problematic medical discourses and more active shaping of discourses of chronic pain and illness by those who have these conditions.

A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits, and Other State-Sponsored Inventions, Zosha Stuckey: New York: SUNY Press, 2014. 176 pages.

Much of Lynch and River’s collection refers to Latour with an assumption that the audience will have already read much of his work and is familiar with most of the texts and concepts discussed throughout the collection. As a whole, then, this text reads less as an introduction to Latour’s work and more as a companion to Latour’s writing. The collection would pair well, for example, with several of Latour’s books in a graduate course. Lynch and Rivers also draw attention to the identity makeup of their own collection, noting that their text contains eight female authors and sixteen male with fairly homogonous racial backgrounds (13). This collection is as much indicative of the imbalance in the field in terms of who is permitted to do theory within the discipline, a criticism of Latour’s work, which also does not consider issues of race and gender. It is also centered in Western rhetorical traditions and American contexts, reflective of this imbalance within the field overall. Yet the wide range of topics included in this collection, from theoretical concepts, to pedagogy, to diverse field sites of childcare resource groups, Twitter, and transportation planning, also demonstrates the productive diversity of these applications and future research directions. The breadth of the work as a whole will make it an important and long-lasting contribution to this conversation within the field. This edited collection presents not only a thorough reflection on the place of Latour’s work within rhetoric and composition but also a consideration of the field. Through a contemplation of the ideas of this particular French theorist, Lynch and Rivers’s text also reaffirms and expands the endeavors of the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole.