Bodies of Knowledge: Biomarkers and Rhetoric of the Body

Abstract

This manuscript offers a critical rhetorical analysis of a multi-site, longitudinal study’s procedures in collecting and recording biomarkers. This manuscript opens new areas of exploration for the field of the rhetoric of health and medicine as the biomarker sampling for measures of stress, and resilience tie to critical rhetorical theories surrounding power and the body. The training manuals and protocols disseminated to the multi-site research team serve as rhetorical artifacts to examine questions of how the choices of biomarkers and the procedures employed to collect the samples needed to measure them are in and of themselves a production of health knowledge of the bodies and identities of transgender and gender diverse people. This manuscript presents an investigation of the processes of biomarker sample collection in conjunction with how the biomarkers are conceptualized as a means of deconstructing hegemonic assertions of gender and health normality.