WOMEN'S HEALTH SEMINAR WITH Dr. Judy Segal: What do cancer narratives do and why do they do it?

Dr. Judy Segal is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures, and in the Science and Technology Studies Graduate Program in the Faculty of Arts.  Her field is Rhetoric (the study of persuasion from ancient Greece through the present), and, especially, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (she writes about persuasion in a number of health and medical contexts: scientific publication, doctor-patient interviews, illness narratives, pharmaceutical marketing, FDA decision-marketing . . . others.)  She is currently teaching a graduate course on rhetorics of mental health. 

Her book, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine is the foundational book in her field.  Her articles appear in rhetoric journals, science studies journals, interdisciplinary health journals, and medical journals. Her first article on the FDA approval of the drug flibanserin for “female sexual dysfunction” appeared as one of the first Humanities and Social Science features in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.  Judy has been a Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and a recipient of a Killam Teaching Prize. She was a member of the first President’s International Advisory Committee of CIHR.

Judy’s research has covered a range of topics in women’s health.  She has published not only on breast-cancer experience and breast-cancer narratives (her topic today), but also on women and pain (especially migraine) and on women’s sexual desire and the medicalization of sex. She is currently writing about aging, ageism, and, especially ageism and women. (Fun fact: during the US primaries in 2016, Judy googled the phrases “Bernie Sanders too old” and “Hilary Clinton too old.” She found nearly 10 times more results for Clinton than for Sanders—about 2 million people found Clinton too old to be President, compared with about 200,000 for Sanders. As Judy writes in a recent essay on the rhetoric of ageism, Clinton’s grandmotherhood was a favorite topic of internet comments—although Clinton had seven times fewer grandchildren than Sanders; she was also six years younger.)