This dissertation applies a cultural rhetorics methodological approach to the topic of infertility, investigating how individuals narrate and memorialize their infertility journey through visual art. While prior scholarship has examined rhetorical constructions of infertility as discourse, this dissertation offers an alternative framework to examining the rhetorical choices infertile individuals are confronted with when diagnosed with the disease. This project emerged out of my collaboration with The ART of Infertility, which is a community art, oral history and portraiture traveling exhibit using art as a visual method to spur infertility advocacy. In this dissertation, I argue for a "research as care" methodology where bodies of health and medicine become participants actively constructing their narratives-both in academic research and in community health advocacy projects. I enact this methodology by interviewing three self-identified infertile artists who previously donated pieces of their art to The ART of Infertility. My research participants demonstrate that art, as a form of multimodal composition, serves as an effective tool for processing infertility as an invisible and stigmatized identity. Additionally, participants note how composing their infertility stories through artwork allowed them to share and more effectively communicate their struggles to conceive with others. All three participants speak to the potential that art serves in reorienting others, who may never face difficulty conceiving, to the experience of infertility. This work contributes to rhetoric and composition, speaking to the potential of community engaged rhetorical scholarship in topics of health and medicine as well as the application of multimodal composition in marginalized health communities and technical communication. Further, this work interdisciplinary contribution to fields such as art therapy, medical education, women's and gender studies and art education.
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