Jordynn Jack | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (original) (raw)

Books by Jordynn Jack

Neurorealism -- Neuroessentialism -- Neurorhetoric -- Neurosex -- Neuropolitics -- Neuroaffect.It... more Neurorealism -- Neuroessentialism -- Neurorhetoric -- Neurosex -- Neuropolitics -- Neuroaffect.Item embargoed for five year

The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as w... more The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as well as within the medical, scholarly, and autistic communities. Jordynn Jack suggests the proliferating number of discussions point to autism as a rhetorical phenomenon that engenders attempts to persuade through arguments, appeals to emotions, and representational strategies. In Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks, Jack focuses on the ways gender influences popular discussion and understanding of autism's causes and effects. She identifies gendered theories like the “refrigerator mother” theory, for example, which blames emotionally distant mothers for autism, and the “extreme male brain” theory, which links autism to the modes of systematic thinking found in male computer geeks. Jack's analysis reveals how people employ such highly gendered theories to craft rhetorical narratives around stock characters--fix-it dads, heroic mother warriors rescuing ch...

During World War II, women scientists responded to urgent calls for their participation in the wa... more During World War II, women scientists responded to urgent calls for their participation in the war effort. Even though newspapers, magazines, books, and films forecasted tremendous growth in scientific and technical jobs for women, the war produced few long-term gains in the percentage of women in the sciences or in their overall professional standing. In Science on the Home Front, Jordynn Jack argues that it was the very language of science--the discourses and genres of scientific communication--that helped to limit women's progress in science even as it provided opportunities for a small group of prominent female scientists to advance during the war. The book uses the experiences of individual women--from physicists Leona Marshall and Katharine Way, who worked on the Manhattan Project, to Lydia J. Roberts, who developed the Recommended Dietary Allowances--to illuminate the broader limitations of masculine scientific culture and its discourses of expertise, gender neutrality, t...

Articles: Rhetorical Theory by Jordynn Jack

Rhetoric Review, 2022

While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brai... more While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brain, rhetorical figures emerge through embo-died experiences within an environment, crystallizing material pat-terns and bringing elements of a cognitive ecology into relief. In particular, figures of repetition coordinate regularities in the environ-ment, linking repeated items into relational relationships. Figures of description such as enargeia enact sensory education, making salient aspects of the environment perceptible. A situated example involving a controversy over wind turbine installation in Canada shows how rural community members use these figures to coordinate sensory information and persuade others to understand the issue differently.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2022

Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at ... more Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at stake. Yet nearly every dispute over water involves not just contested meanings but contested ontologies. This essay examines water ontologies in a controversy over water wells in Ontario, Canada, which residents claim were affected by pile driving for wind turbine installation. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontologies and the Bakhtinian term, chronotope, I show how different water ontologies emerge from spatiotemporal orientations and shift how expertise is enacted. Common water ontologies, water-as-resource and water-as-chemical-entity, enshrine white settlers as experts, despite their different stances on the issue in question. Municipal leaders, corporate representatives, and community members enacted water as an entity knowable to technoscience and exploitable by humans. An alternative ontology introduced by First Nations leaders, water-as-lifeblood, emphasizes water as a sacred, life-giving force. Speakers authorize themselves as experts by enacting water differently.

Poroi, 2020

In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on lingui... more In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of materialsemiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies-a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and "rogue" pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR-we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these "turnings" allow resilient materialsemiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2009

holds an important place in the history of scientific visual rhetoric. Hooke's accomplishment lie... more holds an important place in the history of scientific visual rhetoric. Hooke's accomplishment lies not only in a stunning array of engravings, but also in a ''pedagogy of sight''*a rhetorical framework that instructs readers how to view images in accordance with an ideological or epistemic program. Hooke not only taught his readers how to view a new kind of image, but recruited potential contributors to the program of natural philosophy. In particular, Hooke taught his readers to see microscopic specimens as mechanical bodies, as evidence of divine creation, and as pleasant entertainment.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2004

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2008

College English, 2006

Page 1. 52 Chronotopes: Forms of Time in Rhetorical Argument Jordynn Jack ... Jordynn Jack is ass... more Page 1. 52 Chronotopes: Forms of Time in Rhetorical Argument Jordynn Jack ... Jordynn Jack is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition. Winner of the 2006 James Berlin Memorial ...

ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, 2002

Information foraging theory and strategic planning theory can help technical communicators think ... more Information foraging theory and strategic planning theory can help technical communicators think about effective research methods. A broader understanding of social theory can complement Gattis's approach by adding considerations related to underlying ideological assumptions and to how research practices are situated in the larger contexts of organizations, communities, and cultures.

Articles: Neurorhetorics by Jordynn Jack

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2010

Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communicat... more Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communication. Rhetoricians may be attracted to neuroscience research that uses imaging tools (such as fMRI) to draw inferences about rhetorical concepts, such as emotion, reason, or empathy. Yet this interdisciplinary effort poses challenges to rhetorical scholars. Accordingly, research in neurorhetorics should be two-sided: not only should researchers question the neuroscience of rhetoric (the brain functions related to persuasion and argument), but they should also inquire into the rhetoric of neuroscience (how neuroscience research findings are framed rhetorically). This two-sided approach can help rhetoric scholars to use neuroscience insights in a responsible manner, minimizing analytical pitfalls. These two approaches can be combined to examine neuroscience discussions about methodology, research, and emotion, and studies of autism and empathy, with a rhetorical as well as scientific lens. Such an approach yields productive insights into rhetoric while minimizing potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2014

■ Cognitive neuroscience, as a discipline, links the biological systems studied by neuroscience t... more ■ Cognitive neuroscience, as a discipline, links the biological systems studied by neuroscience to the processing constructs studied by psychology. By mapping these relations throughout the literature of cognitive neuroscience, we visualize the semantic structure of the discipline and point to directions for future research that will advance its integrative goal. For this purpose, network text analyses were applied to an exhaustive corpus of abstracts collected from five major journals over a 30-month period, including every study that used fMRI to investigate psychological processes. From this, we generate network maps that illustrate the relationships among psychological and anatomical terms, along with centrality statistics that guide inferences about network structure. Three terms-prefrontal complex, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex-dominate the net-work structure with their high frequency in the literature and the density of their connections with other neuroanatomical terms. From network statistics, we identify terms that are understudied compared with their importance in the network (e.g., insula and thalamus), underspecified in the language of the discipline (e.g., terms associated with executive function), or imperfectly integrated with other concepts (i.e., subdisciplines like decision neuroscience that are disconnected from the main network). Taking these results as the basis for prescriptive recommendations, we conclude that semantic analyses provide useful guidance for cognitive neuroscience as a discipline, both by illustrating systematic biases in the conduct and presentation of research and by identifying directions that may be most productive for future research. ■

Hardly a week goes by in which a news item does not appear about how neuroscientists are getting ... more Hardly a week goes by in which a news item does not appear about how neuroscientists are getting closer to "mapping" the human brain. Indeed, the idea that the brain is terra incognita, awaiting scientific explorers, is itself a common topos used to describe what neuroscientists do. The comparison is often explicit; as Shelly Fan puts it:

Framework for Success in Postsecondary Education has garnered much scholarly attention. The Frame... more Framework for Success in Postsecondary Education has garnered much scholarly attention. The Framework features two lists of criteria to guide curricular development that will prepare students R for college-level writing. The first list includes eight habits of mind, which the Framework defines as "ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical" (CWPA et al. 1), followed by five qualities of "writing, reading, and critical analysis experiences" that enact those habits (1). Since its publication, scholars have provided important feedback on the Framework, particularly the habits of mind. Some of the remarks have been positive (Sullivan). Two edited volumes have expanded on the Framework and its applications, including The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing: Scholarship and Applications (edited by Nicholas N. Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen) and Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing (edited by J. Michael Rifenburg, Patricia Portanova, and Duane Roen). While offering some nuances, these volumes largely support the Framework and seek to extend its applications to programs and curricula. Meanwhile, some scholars have offered trenchant critiques of the Framework's use of habits of mind. Daniel Gross and Jonathan Alexander argue that the habits of mind reflect problematic principles associated with positive psychology. In particular, they state, "we might argue that the Framework achieves plausibility in part by invoking a warrant deeply embedded in this current popular and intellectual climate: happiness leads to success" (285). Gross and Alexander Jordynn Jack is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses in rhetoric of science, women's rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and health humanities.

Rhetoric Review, 2022

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2022

Poroi, 2020

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2009

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2004

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2008

College English, 2006

ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, 2002

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2010

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2014

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2011

The rhetorical figure of the incrementum, or scale, can help to account for how autism spectrum d... more The rhetorical figure of the incrementum, or scale, can help to account for how autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been gendered as male, especially in Simon Baron-Cohen’s "Extreme Male Brain" theory. The incrementum occurs when female, male, and autistic brains are placed along a scale according to systemizing and empathizing abilities. This double hierarchy reinforces popular beliefs about sex and gender, drawing on the cultural resources of hi-tech culture, the service economy, and geekiness. In so doing, these theories overlook other important aspects of ASD, including alternative theories, the presence of autistic women and girls, and the needs and interests of autistic people themselves.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or s... more This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Many tools that neuroscientists use to trace the complex topography of the human brain draw on th... more Many tools that neuroscientists use to trace the complex topography of the human brain draw on the neuroscience literature to yield “metanalyses” or “syntheses of data.” These approaches conflate rhetorical connections in the literature with physical connections in the brain. By contrast, the model presented in this chapter seeks not a topography of the brain but a topology of neuroscience. A social network analysis of titles and abstracts for cognitive neuroscience articles yields a topology of brain regions and functions. This map can help researchers identify underresearched areas (e.g., the thalamus) or areas that are oversaturated (e.g., the amygdala). The map also helps researchers identify subdisciplines, such as “neuroeconomics,” that have not yet integrated with the broader field—“islands” where rhetorical work could yield benefits.

Women's Studies in Communication, 2012

The prevalence of nontraditional gender identities in many autistic people raises provocative que... more The prevalence of nontraditional gender identities in many autistic people raises provocative questions for feminist scholars. In particular, autistic writers often invite alternative understandings of sex/gender as a multiple, rhetorical phenomenon. Autobiographies, blogs, and Internet posts show how autistic individuals view gender as a copia, or tool for inventing multiple possibilities through available sex/gender discourses. Four particular discourses emerge through which autistic people understand gender: identification, neurodiversity, performance, and queer identity.

Rhetoric Review, 2009

While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetor... more While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetorics, we lack methodologies that situate these factors—and the additional factor of time—in an integrated system. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “acts of institution” can help feminist rhetoricians to construct richer accounts of the gendering of the female body. The example of rhetorics surrounding women factory workers in World War II America demonstrates how rhetorical practices produce gender differences through embodied, spatiotemporal rhetorics. In this case wartime adjustments did not bring about long-term changes because they relied on a fundamental antithesis between men and women.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2007

may not seem overtly rhetorical, but can nonetheless be understood as laying the groundwork for c... more may not seem overtly rhetorical, but can nonetheless be understood as laying the groundwork for communication between groups. Strategies such as choosing meeting facilities, composing official statements, and listening to guest speakers helped members to forge common ground, but ultimately, larger disagreements prevented the aswpl supporters from reaching consensus with African American campaigners who were pushing for federal antilynching legislation. Nonetheless, this example contributes to scholarship on the rhetoric of the civil rights movement by highlighting the importance of interracial communication as a rhetorical practice.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

ABSTRACT This article examines nutritionist Lydia J. Roberts’s use of the “democratic approach” a... more ABSTRACT This article examines nutritionist Lydia J. Roberts’s use of the “democratic approach” as a rhetorical strategy both to build solidarity among scientists and to enact participatory research in a rural Puerto Rican community. This example suggests that participatory scientific methodologies are not necessarily democratic but may function rhetorically to serve nondemocratic purposes.

PMLA, 2019

During World War II, women were heavily recruited for scientific and technical jobs across the un... more During World War II, women were heavily recruited for scientific and technical jobs across the united states. Many assumed roles previously allotted to men, serving as welders, riveters, sheet metal workers, crane operators, ship fitters, and chauffeurs, to name just a few. Between 1941 and 1944, over 6.5 million women joined the workforce; over 10 million were already working outside the home in 1941 (Pidgeon vi). The Brooklyn Naval Yard, featured in Manhattan Beach as the workplace of Anna, Nell, and their friends, also saw an increase in women workers, albeit a somewhat modest one. By 1944, according to The New York Times, women represented 4,000 of the 65,000 workers at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, not counting office workers (“Women Help Build Carrier”). While women represented just 6% of the industrial labor force at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, women represented 11.5% of all shipyard workers in 1944, according to the United States Department of Labor (Hirshfield 481).

The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Science since 1660, 2022

Singer and Jack Imagine a young woman, newly diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Let's call her Cathy. F... more Singer and Jack Imagine a young woman, newly diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Let's call her Cathy. For years, Cathy has experienced debilitating symptoms that her doctors have dismissed: physical symptoms, such as swollen, stiff joints, persistent fatigue, and insomnia, but also psychosocial symptoms-the anxiety that stems from missing deadlines at school; the depression and isolation that stem from missing social engagements when she is just too tired to join her friends for a night out after a long day of classes. Cathy hopes that a diagnosis will finally help her to at least cope with her condition. Imagine how she feels, now that she finally has a diagnosis, when she logs onto her computer, types "living with chronic illness" in her search engine, and comes across advice from official sources that tell her she simply needs to adjust to a "new normal"the same thing her doctor told her earlier that day. The "Living with Chronic Illness-Dealing with Feelings" page on MedlinePlus, for instance, attempts to sound understanding: You may feel like you are not a whole person anymore. You might be embarrassed or ashamed that you have an illness. Know that, with time, your illness will become part of you and you will have a new normal. (Vorvick, Zieve, & Ogilvie, 2016, para. 3) Reading on, however, our newly diagnosed patient reads advice that seems simplistic. To deal with stress, the website suggests that Cathy should, "[g]o for a walk," "[t]ry yoga, tai chi, or meditation," or "[s]pend time with a friend" (Vorvick, Zieve, & Ogilvie, 2016, para. 11). Eventually, the website continues, you will "[l]earn how to live with your chronic illness" by learning more about it, and although "[a]t first it might seem like it is controlling you, but the more you learn and can do for yourself, the more normal and in control you will feel" (Vorvick,

To forge collaborative ties among the rhetoric of health and medicine, the medical humanities, an... more To forge collaborative ties among the rhetoric of health and medicine, the medical humanities, and medicine itself, scholars need shared terms. We argue that techne can unite researchers from across these disciplines. To demonstrate, we discuss our interdisciplinary research study, Writing Diabetes. By learning about the techne of rhetoric and writing about diabetes, participants became more attentive to the techne of their health experience-or "health techne"-enabling them to invent new ways of "doing" diabetes.

This essay argues that pre-health humanities programs should focus on intensive research practice... more This essay argues that pre-health humanities programs should focus on intensive research practice for baccalaureate students and provides three guiding principles for implementing it. Although the interdisciplinary nature of health humanities permits baccalaureate students to use research methods from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, pre-health humanities coursework tends to force students to adopt only one of many disciplinary identities. Alternatively, an intensive research approach invites students to critically select and combine methods from multiple (and seemingly opposing) disciplines to ask and answer questions about health problems more innovatively. Using the authors' experiences with implementing health humanities baccalaureate research initiatives at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors contend that pre-health humanities programs should teach and study multiple disciplinary research methods and their values; examine how health humanities research might transfer across disciplines; and focus on mentoring opportunities for funding, presenting, and publishing research. These recommendations have the potential to

In this article, we investigate the role of scientific and patient narratives on perceptions of t... more In this article, we investigate the role of scientific and patient narratives on perceptions of the medical debate around gestational diabetes (GDM) testing. Among medical scientists, we show that the narrative surrounding GDM testing affirms that future research and data will lead to medical consensus. We call this narrative trajectory the Bdeferred quest.^For patients, however, diagnosis and their subsequent discovery that biomedicine does not speak in one voice ruptures their trust in medical authority. This new distrust creates space for patients to develop a Frankian quest narrative where they become the protagonist in their story. Additionally, across these different narratives, we observe how character is constructed and employed to negotiate trust. We conclude that healthcare providers should assess the narrative trajectory adopted by patients after diagnosis. Also, we suggest that providers acknowledge the lack of medical consensus to their patients. This veracity would foster women's sense of trust in their provider as well as allow women to be active interlocutors in a debate that ultimately plays out in their deliberation about their body, pregnancy, and risk.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2016

In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhe... more In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhetorics, one that considers (1) how wearable technologies enable micro-performances of gender, status, and identity; (2) how wearable technologies are embedded in policy/political frameworks as well as scientific/medical ones; (3) how wearable technologies are embedded in spatiotemporal networks of actors, objects, and so on; and (4) how the design of technological objects themselves do or do not live up to the promises of wearability and mobility. Using an analysis of the breast pump as my case and drawing from interviews with women about their experiences, I show how the breast pump crystallizes a network of rhetorics that is both disruptive and productive of gendered differences. In particular, the breast pump presents rhetorical arguments for returning to work soon after childbirth while performing a professional role. At the same time, this technology makes an argument for including nursing bodies on college campuses, spaces that have not historically considered those bodies or their needs.

Technical Communication Quarterly, 2018

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2010

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 2002

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2015

We have been asking the wrong questions about lobotomy. This, at least, is Jenell Johnson's first... more We have been asking the wrong questions about lobotomy. This, at least, is Jenell Johnson's first claim. Did they really use an ice pick? Were criminals lobotomized? Were black people, or women, or communists disproportionately subjected to the invasive surgery? And just what sort of ailment was it-medical, social, political, racial-that demanded the so-called electroconvulsive therapy machine, holes drilled through the skull, and the leucotome swept back and forth through the brain, severing the fibers behind the forehead that otherwise connected the thalamus to the frontal lobes. These are pressing questions, and they are widely asked. But they are not, Johnson tells us in the second paragraph of American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical Perspective, the "most obvious question of all" (1). Before we ask about the political distribution of lobotomy or the shifting domains in which it registered, we need to ask the obvious-but all too often overlookedquestion of ontology: What is a lobotomy? There is no simple answer. The procedure itself changed several times, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Every possible aspect of lobotomy changed radically within the short lifespan of lobotomy. The science that justified it, the brain that received it, the instruments that enabled it, the pathology that demanded it, the institutions that housed it, the men who championed it, and the politics that gave it relevance: each of these changed over time. One might be tempted to stipulate the human brain as the stable target of an oft-varied procedure, but this only works with the proviso that the human brain changed in 1949: the limbic system displaced the thalamus as the seat of the emotions and became the new target of lobotomy (109-10). So what is a lobotomy? I would like to suggest that, as a field, we have much to learn from the eloquence and rigor with which Jenell Johnson probes this question. She works from the basic assumption that lobotomy has no single definition. It has no substance, no essence. Historically speaking, it consists only in an incredibly long list of associations with other things, such as sciences, brains, and communism. Given this history, Johnson takes the sensible route: instead of pretending that lobotomy has a substance, she insists that the only way to define the term is to account for the ever-changing connections between lobotomy and other phenomena. Her principle is simple: if the ingredients change, the composition will change. If institutions, doctors, brains, or ice picks are essential to lobotomy (and it has always been difficult to imagine the procedure without them), then lobotomy itself will change with every shift of its component parts. The principle may be simple, but it is also revolutionary. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Johnson's ontology holds the potential to remap the field of rhetoric in two ways. First, she has made lobotomy our collective business. Johnson's insistence on defining lobotomy by the sum of its always-shifting relations means that lobotomy is hardly a discreet entity. To define it, as we shall see, is also to define sexuality, brain science, and more. Second, as I explore at the end of this review, Johnson's ontology holds the potential to dramatically expand the domain of rhetoric. Perhaps lobotomies, icepicks, and brains are just as rhetorical as speeches delivered from the campaign trail. I spend the remainder of this review reflecting on these two contributions: the expansion of lobotomy and the expansion of rhetoric. As will become clear, the latter is a function of the former. Johnson's innovative ontology offers us a host of new possibilities for thinking about the future of rhetorical inquiry. Consider first the expansion of lobotomy. Drawing on the work of Ian Hacking, Johnson calls lobotomy a "medical marvel" (9)-an ostensibly medical operation that cannot be explained within the domain of medicine. The marvel, she writes, "is contaminated by its unfettered circulation within public culture and the multiple meanings that accrue as a result" (10). This contamination is constitutive. Lobotomy is a medical procedure to be sure, but it is also scientific, gendered, and racial. These latter domains are neither incidental nor secondary.

Rhetoric Review, 2022

ABSTRACT While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to... more ABSTRACT While current cognitive approaches to rhetorical figures portray them as internalized to the brain, rhetorical figures emerge through embodied experiences within an environment, crystallizing material patterns and bringing elements of a cognitive ecology into relief. In particular, figures of repetition coordinate regularities in the environment, linking repeated items into relational relationships. Figures of description such as enargeia enact sensory education, making salient aspects of the environment perceptible. A situated example involving a controversy over wind turbine installation in Canada shows how rural community members use these figures to coordinate sensory information and persuade others to understand the issue differently.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Journal of medical humanities, 2017

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2016

Disability & Society, 2015

ABSTRACT The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the m... more ABSTRACT The reasons behind the increase in autism diagnoses have become hotly contested in the media as well as within the medical, scholarly, and autistic communities. Jordynn Jack suggests the proliferating number of discussions point to autism as a rhetorical phenomenon that engenders attempts to persuade through arguments, appeals to emotions, and representational strategies. In Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks, Jack focuses on the ways gender influences popular discussion and understanding of autism's causes and effects. She identifies gendered theories like the “refrigerator mother” theory, for example, which blames emotionally distant mothers for autism, and the “extreme male brain” theory, which links autism to the modes of systematic thinking found in male computer geeks. Jack's analysis reveals how people employ such highly gendered theories to craft rhetorical narratives around stock characters--fix-it dads, heroic mother warriors rescuing children from autism--that advocate for ends beyond the story itself while also allowing the storyteller to gain authority, understand the disorder, and take part in debates. Autism and Gender reveals the ways we build narratives around controversial topics while offering new insights into the ways rhetorical inquiry can and does contribute to conversations about gender and disability.

We wrote this book to offer writing instruction to legal professionals based on our expertise in ... more We wrote this book to offer writing instruction to legal professionals based on our expertise in rhetorica discipline founded over 2500 years ago to help people plead their cases in court. Ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians developed theories of how best to persuade ...