Rhetorics of Vigilance: Refracting Discourses in Technologies of Self-Managed Health & Wellness

Rhetorics of Vigilance explores the limits of feminist health rhetorics by examining technologies that promote women’s self-managed health and wellness practices. By establishing a corpus of personal health technologies and associated texts including mobile health applications, pelvic floor training devices, and perimenopause information shared on social media, this dissertation analyzes how discourses refract––redirected and often distorted––to implicate women in persistent self-monitoring. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship on women’s health from feminist rhetorical studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, science and technology studies, and digital studies, I theorize rhetorics of vigilance as a framework through which women understand and interpret issues of health and wellness and conceive of action to address those issues. This framework explains why mechanisms of control and discipline in women’s health endure despite medical advances and shifting social attitudes, and it uncovers how these mechanisms function rhetorically in everyday health practices. In the case of self-managed health technologies, rhetorics of vigilance divert messages of self-efficacy and empowerment to reinscribe health and wellness as a relentless process of attentive care. By revealing these patterns, this dissertation both critiques the demands of self-managed health and calls for alternative feminist health frameworks that prioritize collective care, embodied knowledge, and systemic change over individualized responsibility and constant self-surveillance.