Blending rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, and lived experience, Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures explores the forces that have long framed menopause as a problem to solve, a decline to fear, and a market to exploit. Against this backdrop, the authors craft expansive, agency-affirming futures for living with/and/through menopause.Across six chapters, the authors trace how menopause circulates through medical research, workplace expectations, care...

Naomi Edmunds has a gift she wishes she could return. All of her life, she's had visions that have led to trouble and shown nothing but disappointment and sadness—especially when it comes to her love life. Date after date has been marked by visions of impending disaster—or boredom. Naomi isn't sure which is worse.When her friend sets her up with a real estate attorney, the last thing she wants to do is keep the date. With her visions a closely-guarded secret, her friend's patience ...

Four years after surviving another attack from her enemies, Courtney Thompson has found peace. She's engaged to her boyfriend, Santiago, and living her dream of being a professional actress.Despite her love of the stage, Courtney feels a pull toward her past and the work she's avoided. When she announces her decision to return and her intention to work with him, Santiago becomes evasive and tries to talk her out of it. His behavior worries her and makes her think she's marrying a s...

After spending the majority of her 18th year being treated for a mental breakdown, and having confronted the person responsible for all the pain she'd been through over the past year, Courtney Thompson is now taking her first steps to getting her life back – she's back in school, getting involved in the drama department again, and forming some friendships.On top of the changes in her life, Courtney's being called to make a decision about her fledgling relationship with Santiago Mar...

Courtney's world has been shattered. Crippled by grief and guilt, she has closed herself off. She doesn't care about anything anymore, and has spent months locked away for her own safety. Horrifying dreams of the very person and things she wants to forget make things worse, to the point where Courtney isn't even sure what's real and what isn't anymore. Elaine Wilson has been assigned to help draw her out of her shell, but Courtney fights her at every step.Santiago has just begun fo...

Months after learning the truth about herself, and being betrayed by someone she trusted, Courtney Thompson is a changed person. Nearly crippled by anxiety and bitterness, she struggles to adjust to college life. She is ashamed of the person she's become, and tries to hide it from her boyfriend, Sam.To deal, she loses herself in the one thing that can make her forget it all: acting. While preparing for an upcoming production, the male lead asks her to help him run lines. Although t...

When Justine Martin finds her list of resolutions for the previous year, she decides to try and complete the list before her family's New Year's Eve party that evening. While checking the items off her list, she is forced to come to terms with some bad habits and confront romantic feelings that she has suppressed for too long.As the hours inch closer to midnight, will she be able to complete the list or keep hiding herself in the clutter around her?

As the nightmares that haunted her a year ago return, Fiona Stevens wonders if she is destined for anything more than pain.Fiona and her boyfriend, Ted Richards, are enjoying their new lives in college when the dreams reemerge. Shaken, she brushes them off but it soon becomes clear that someone she trusts knows about the lives she has tried so hard to forget.Someone that wants her dead.Ted suspects there is more going on than he is being told, but Fiona tells him sh...

Beware the muse with a chip on her shoulder.Muses are often called uncooperative, grumpy, lazy beings who abandon a writer when they're needed most. Now, one of them has decided to tell their side of the story. Meet Clarissa, a muse who has spent centuries trying to inspire artists who sometimes are too stubborn to listen to her.What is your muse trying to say to you? Clarissa might just be able to answer that...

This book explores how women make meaning at various health flashpoints in their lives, overcoming fear, anxiety, and anger to draw upon self-advocacy, research, and crucial decision-making.Combining focus group research, content analysis, autoethnography, and textual inquiry, the book argues that the making and remaking of what we call “patient epistemologies” is a continual process wherein a health flashpoint—sometimes a new diagnosis, sometimes a reoccurrence or worsening of an ...

Building on various feminist theories of ethos, the authors in this collection explore how North American Catholic women from various periods, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes have used elements of the group’s positionality to make change. The women considered in the book range from the earliest Catholic sisters who arrived in the United States to women who held the Church hierarchy accountable for the sexual abuse scandals. The book analyzes women such as those in an African A...

Confronting Toxic Rhetoric contributes to the extant scholarship on toxic rhetoric, specifically the negative and extreme political discourse surrounding the Trump years of campaigning, rallying, tweeting, holding office, and the ongoing culture war in the US (Duffy, 2020). Toxic rhetoric challenged the foundational purposes of teaching writing and rhetoric, such as ethical argumentation and critical thinking. Teachers’ narratives, case studies, and reflections bring to l...