Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness

by Molly Margaret Kessler

In Stigma 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.

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 2022

Reviews

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Ohio State Press for a gifted copy of Molly Margaret Kessler’s STIGMA STORIES: RHETORIC, LIVED EXPERIENCE, AND CHRONIC ILLNESS. Kessler examines stigma as a rhetorical practice by analyzing stories of ostomies and chronic gastrointestinal conditions through a crip lens. The stories and interviews featured in this book illuminated not just the ways stigma around ostomies and GI diseases are experienced, but also about the ways ostomies have had a positive change for these communities. Kessler connects concepts from disability and crip studies—crip time, disability models, etc.—to her analyses of the ways ostomies and chronic GI diseases are talked about and/or depicted. Featured within this book: blog posts, Aerie campaigns, TLC shows, social media tags, and more.

What this book left me wanting: Kessler admits that the research is missing a deeper dive into the intersectional. While the book does provide critique on some of limitations of these stigma stories, I wanted a deeper, more thorough grounding in intersectionality. I kept thinking back to Natasha Boyd’s article in The Drift, “Sick to Our Stomachs: Why Does Everyone Have IBS?”, and the limits of destigmatization campaigns (which may largely focus cis, white, well-off communities). Who is “Hot Girls Have IBS” truly serving, and what are the stories of those left behind by this isolation of chronic GI problems away from the complex entanglement of social, racial, and economic issues? What role does rhetoric and destigmatization play in providing better access to medical care, food security, and secure housing?