The social justice turn in technical communication pushes scholars and teachers to “reenvision the field” through a “larger tapestry” that not only draws on, but perhaps centralizes, interdisciplinary research and practice (Jones, Moore, Walton, 2016, p. 223). To continue working toward inclusion, as many technical communication researchers have shown (Del Hierro, 2018; Jones, 2016; Haas & Eble, 2018; Shelton, 2019), it’s important we expand our disciplinary grounding by incorporating research from fields outside of technical communication that have engaged in efforts for justice and inclusion for many centuries. This is especially true, we argue, when doing technical communication research in areas like healthcare—as there is a wide body of work in a wide variety of fields that addresses the intersectionality of healthcare and a multiplicity of bodies, but a dearth of technical communication literature that takes up more than a few token topics in these important areas.

For example, Sabrina Strings (2019) engages bodies at the intersections of fields such as Fat Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Gender Studies to address health issues such as food insecurity and type 2 diabetes. Relatedly, Zakiya Luna (2009) examines Sister Song’s women of color feminism (and organizing) to push academic conversations beyond the limited scope of reproductive rights and toward a more expansive vision of reproductive justice, which fights for access to equitable living conditions––often denied by systemic oppression––that a person needs to decide whether or not (and how) they want to have children. In an adjacent vein, C. Riley Snorton (2017) and Julian Gill-Peterson (2019) both examine how contemporary medical advances used to provide gender affirming care for (some, often more privileged) trans people were borne from centuries of white supremacist abuse––enacted by white doctors and their enablers, who targeted, enslaved, incarcerated, institutionalized, and/or kidnapped Black, Brown, immigrant, intersex, disabled, and poor people for the purpose of coerced, nonconsensual, and unnecessary medical experimentation (and torture). In technical communication, Avery Edenfield, Steve Holmes, and Jared Colton (2019) analyze user-generated instructions for administering do-it-yourself hormone replacement therapy (DIY HRT), urging the field to develop a new approach to queer theory that “refuses to align queer agency with stable identities” (p. 177). Drawing on this interdisciplinary research, then, this special issue emphasizes the importance of approaching healthcare through intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) frameworks that center the experiences of multiply-marginalized bodies. Specifically, we seek scholarship on reproductive and gendered healthcare that pays careful attention to the ways in which gendered and racialized notions of health often destructively guide reproductive and/or gendered health conversations, practices, and care.

We also note that technical communication has recently seen a growth in work on women’s reproductive health. While cautious of trends that position women’s health as always already about reproduction, we position this special issue as a call to further parse how our field attends to what we understand and term “women’s health”—both women’s health as a category worthy of inquiry independent of reproductive function, and as a construct that (as currently configured) can lead to a myopic and flattened view of the bodies and ways-of-being included in and by such a category. We seek answers to questions such as (but not limited to):

How can technical communication scholars be attentive to patterns in field research so as to better represent the interests of our diverse stakeholders?

In what ways are technical communication researchers responsible for trends in healthcare wherein certain populations are underserved/victimized (e.g. Black cisgender women dying in childbirth at such high rates, queer and transgender folx being denied access to care, cisgender women being refused voluntary sterilization)?

How can technical communication research on medical and health rhetorics make direct impacts on healthcare practice?

We recognize both the imperative social justice nature of inclusive healthcare—given that, for example, medical institutions have typically engaged white cisgender men as the “neutral” body from which all treatments have stemmed. We know, for example, that while white cis men's health is centered as some kind of universal in terms of treatments and health initiatives. We also know that the "medical advances" around gynecology and gender-affirming treatments (which tend to benefit white cis women, and white monied trans patients, respectively) are borne from the violent (and ongoing) legacies of chattel slavery, eugenics, mass incarceration, and institutional racism––which targeted (and continue to target) Black, Brown, Indigenous, and intersex people in particular.