2007 ATTW proposal

Title: 2007 ATTW proposal
By: Hilary

While professionals exert social control by positioning themselves “as the sole providers of vital, knowledge-based services” (Faber, 2006, p. 315), recent work in professional communication suggests that this “professional dominance” (Faber, p. 322) is not absolute. Medical patients, for example, deploy a range of “discursive” and “bodily” countermeasures to “resist medical regulatory rhetoric” (Koeber, p. 87). However, no scholarly work has examined how these acts of “rhetorical agency and resistance” (p. 87), in turn, impact and change the “mainstream medical discourse” (Koeber, p. 93).

This paper, then, examines the impact of patients’ networked writing on one form of change in the mainstream medical discourse: depathologization, the process by which medical pathologies are reclassified as neutral traits. As virtual communities of individuals with a common medical diagnosis emerge over wide-area networks [WANs], these communities gradually break away from the medical community to establish a community identity that is not based on a medical-pathological model. These new communities are then poised to argue for depathologization.

I will examine the role of networked writing in the depathologization of several virtual communities, focusing on how the networked writing of the autism community has transformed mainstream medical discourse about autism as reflected in recent moves from within mainstream medical discourse to depathologize autism (Attwood, 2006).