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Life-Affirming: Rhetorics of Bodies and Health in Kansas City Abolitionist Movements
Fitzsimmons, Brynn Laurel
Fitzsimmons, Brynn Laurel
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Abstract
This ethnographic study considers activist rhetorical practices around health, bodies, and access, and how these often-cited but extremely flexible terms structure public discourse and civic life. It draws on nearly two years of public records of activist work in Kansas City, Missouri, qualitative interviews, and digital media records to draw out how activists engage questions of health and the body in abolitionist work—particularly how activists redefine embodiment, health, and access in ways that support what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed “life-affirming institutions.” In particular, I propose that as part of abolitionist work, activists and organizers engage in re-embodiment—the strategic renegotiation of the terms of public debate that structures whose bodies are seen, how lived experience is understood, and on what terms that lived experience is made legible in public discourse. In redefining concepts and discourses built on embodiment—like access and health—I argue activists construct a “public health pedagogy”—a framework for teaching dominant publics to reframe conceptions of health and bodies in ways that center marginalized embodied knowledges. To explore these concepts, I discuss several case studies, including the People’s City occupation of Kansas City, Missouri City Hall in October 2020; the Kansas City Homeless Union occupation of city property from January 2021 to February 2022; and the work of Kansas City citizen journalism project Independent Media Association.
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2023-01-01
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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989423_1.pdf
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- Embargoed until 2173-05-31
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Keywords
Rhetoric and Composition, Disability studies, Gender studies, abolition, community literacies, cultural rhetorics, embodiment, health rhetoric, rhetorical theory