Theorizing disenfranchisement as a communicative process

ABSTRACT

This essay lays initial groundwork for a theory of communicative disenfranchisement (TCD), which explores what occurs when individuals’ experiences, identities, and relationships are discredited (i.e., not treated as “real”) by others and how such talk disempowers them and alters their perceptions of future interactions. Five key assumptions of TCD advocate: (1) attending to power; (2) considering discursive and material conditions and their histories; (3) viewing communication as constitutive of reality; (4) adopting a process view; and (5) acknowledging interactions as having multiple meanings. This framework offers two central benefits: (a) aligning critical interpersonal and family communication scholarship with critical research occurring within other communication subfields; and (b) further spurring the critical reconsideration of traditional programs of interpersonal and family communication research. TCD is particularly useful for understanding the roles of power and discourse in communicative contestations as well as the outcomes of such talk.

KEYWORDS:

• communicative disenfranchisement
• critical interpersonal and family communication
• communication theory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Eileen Berlin Ray (Professor Emeritus, Cleveland State University) as well as Patrice M. Buzzanell (Professor, University of South Florida), Marleah Dean Kruzel (Associate Professor, University of South Florida), and Maria K. Venetis (Associate Professor, Rutgers University) for their feedback on the dissertation upon which this essay is based (Elizabeth A. Hintz, “Explicating the Process of Communicative Disenfranchisement for Women with Chronic Overlapping Pain Conditions” [Ph.D. diss., University of South Florida, 2021]).

Notes

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2 Here “talk” refers to the micropractices of discourse that constitute daily interactions and reflect informal, localized operations of power. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

3 Eileen Berlin Ray, ed., Communication and Disenfranchisement: Social Health Issues and Implications (London: Routledge, 1996), xv.

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11 Ibid., 211.

12 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 132.

13 Foucault, Power/Knowledge.

14 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2.

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16 Charee M. Thompson and Christopher M. Duerringer, “Crying Wolf: A Thematic and Critical Analysis of Why Individuals Contest Family Members’ Health Complaints,” Communication Monographs 87, no. 3 (2020): 291–311; Charee M. Thompson, Hengjun Lin, and Sarah Parsloe, “Misrepresenting Health Conditions through Fabrication and Exaggeration: An Adaptation and Replication of the False Alarm Effect,” Health Communication 33, no. 5 (2018): 562–75.

17 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1994), 108.

18 Hartmut B. Mokros and Stanley Deetz, “What Counts as Real? A Constitutive View of Communication and the Disenfranchised in the Context of Health,” in Communication and Disenfranchisement: Social Health Issues and Implications, ed. Eileen Berlin Ray (London: Routledge, 1996), 29–44.

19 Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Strategies for Materializing Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 107–13.

20 Moore and Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research?” 51.

21 Joseph Dumit, “Illnesses You Have to Fight to Get: Facts as Forces in Uncertain, Emergent Illnesses,” Social Science & Medicine 62, no. 3 (2006): 577–90.

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23 Dumit, “Illnesses You Have to Fight to Get,” 585; Jane M. Ussher, “Diagnosing Difficult Women and Pathologising Femininity: Gender Bias in Psychiatric Nosology,” Feminism and Psychology 23, no. 1 (2013): 63–69.

24 Rahim Esfandyarpour et al., “A Nanoelectronics-Blood-Based Diagnostic Biomarker for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS),” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 21 (2019): 10250–57.

25 Moore and Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research?”

26 Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–301.

27 Ibid.

28 For more on intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics, Intersectionality, and Violence against Women,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (New York: New Press, 2017); Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Shinsuke Eguchi, Bernadette M. Calafell, and Nicole Files-Thompson, “Intersectionality and Quare Theory: Fantasizing African American Male Same-Sex Relationships in Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom,” Communication, Culture & Critique 7, no. 3 (2014): 371–89.

29 Jimmie Manning, “Communication Is. . . The Relationship,” in Communication Is. . . Perspectives on Theory, ed. Adam Tyma and Autumn Edwards (San Diego, CA: Cognella, 2020), 47.

30 Denker and Knight, “Communication Is. . . Reification.”

31 Caryn E. Medved, “Stay-at-Home Fathering as a Feminist Opportunity: Perpetuating, Resisting, and Transforming Gender Relations of Caring and Earning,” Journal of Family Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 16–31; Suter, “The Promise of Contrapuntal and Intersectional Methods for Advancing Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research.”

32 Suter, “The Promise of Contrapuntal and Intersectional Methods for Advancing Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research,” 10.

33 Dumit, “Illnesses You Have to Fight to Get.”

34 For more on first- and second-order change, see Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, and Richard Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974); Steven R. Wilson, “First and Second-Order Changes in a Community's Response to a Child Abuse Fatality,” Communication Monographs 73, no. 4 (2006): 481–87.

35 Marshall Scott Poole, “On the Study of Process in Communication Research,” Annals of the International Communication Association 36, no. 1 (2013): 371–409.

36 Ibid.

37 Leslie A. Baxter, Voicing Relationships: A Dialogic Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011); James O. Prochaska and Bess H. Marcus, “The Transtheoretical Model: Applications to Exercise,” in Advances in Exercise Adherence, ed. Rod K. Dishman (Stanningley, U.K.: Human Kinetics, 1994), 161–80; Everett M. Rogers, “Diffusion of Innovations: Modifications of a Model for Telecommunications,” in Die Diffusion von Innovationen in der Telekommunikation: Schriftenreihe des Wissenschaftlichen Instituts für Kommunikationsdienste, vol. 17, ed. Matthias-W. Stoetzer and Alwin Mahler (Berlin: Springer, 1995), 25–38.

38 Poole, “On the Study of Process in Communication Research.”

39 See Marshall Scott Poole et al., “Sequential Analysis of Processes,” in The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies, ed. Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016), 254–70; Erica Scharrer and Srividya Ramasubramanian, Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice (London: Routledge, 2021).

40 Marianne LeGreco and Sarah J. Tracy, “Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Practice,” Qualitative Inquiry 15, no. 9 (2009): 1516–43; Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, and John H. Nicholson, “Turning Points in the Development of Blended Families,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 16, no. 3 (1999): 291–314; Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993); Julia Moore, “Facets of Agency in Stories of Transforming from Childless by Choice to Mother,” Journal of Marriage and Family 79, no. 4 (2017): 1144–59.

41 Steven R. Wilson and John P. Caughlin, “Multiple Goals Theories: Motivations for Family Interactions and Relationships,” in Engaging Theories in Family Communication, 2nd ed., ed. Dawn O, Braithwaite, Elizabeth A. Suter, and Kory Floyd (London: Routledge, 2018), 199–209; Daena J. Goldsmith, Communicating Social Support (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

42 Anne Werner and Kirsti Malterud, “It Is Hard Work Behaving as a Credible Patient: Encounters between Women with Chronic Pain and Their Doctors,” Social Science & Medicine 57, no. 8 (2003): 1409–19.

43 John P. Caughlin, “A Multiple Goals Theory of Personal Relationships: Conceptual Integration and Program Overview,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, no. 6 (2010): 824–48.

44 Robyn L. Donaldson and Marta Meana, “Early Dyspareunia Experience in Young Women: Confusion, Consequences, and Help-Seeking Barriers,” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 8, no. 3 (2011): 814–23.