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Browsing by Author "Herling, Jessica Lauren"

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    Enactment of LGBTQ Health in Medical Curriculum
    Herling, Jessica Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-13)
    This dissertation examined the extent to which medical educational institutions adapt their curriculum to meet the needs of a marginalized patient population, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. Because LGBTQ populations experience significant health and health care disparities in comparison to heterosexual and cisgender populations, medical education and medical curriculum about LGBTQ health has been described as a key area of intervention for improving doctor-patient interactions and health system structures to better accommodate these populations. Through a 10-month long ethnography of a medical school, I examined the formal, informal, and hidden curricula surrounding LGBTQ health to explore how medical schools train and thus adequately prepare medical students to provide care to these patients. To investigate these issues, I conducted over 100 hours of participant observation of medical classes and clinical rotations, with particular attention to clinical case studies and online learning modules that are relevant to LGBTQ health, and LGBTQ health initiatives on the academic medical center campus. I also conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with faculty, students, administrators, LGBTQ Health Center employees, and LGBTQ patients about LGBTQ health care at the medical school and about how these groups define and implement LGBTQ health at the institution. Findings suggest that the content, placement, and delivery of LGBTQ health in the curriculum influence how medical students learn to see themselves as capable of providing care to these patients. In particular, the nebulous nature of LGBTQ health makes it difficult for students to learn to enact it in practice. This research asserts that to create medical curriculum about LGBTQ health that will help alleviate health care disparities, medical schools cannot simply add LGBTQ health into their curriculum without fundamentally changing how they teach sex/gender and sexuality to their students as well as centering intersecting inequalities in their teaching. As such, this dissertation calls for a shift to queer health to decentralize sex/gender and sexuality binaries and focus on the practice of learning about LGBTQ health rather than fulfilling a competency. Ultimately, this research theorizes medical education as a space for the enactment of LGBTQ health whereby the complexity of sex, gender, sexuality, and identity gets negotiated by medical faculty, students, administrators, and LGBTQ community members.
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    Online Community Response to YouTube Abuse
    Herling, Jessica Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-05)
    This study draws on social problems literature about rhetoric in claims-making and social movement literature about credibility in framing to understand the construction of YouTube abuse and relationships between member role in the community and their frames/the reception of those frames. I also draw on feminist, non-feminist, and postfeminist literature to understand how YouTubers incorporate feminism into their claims about why YouTube abuse is wrong. Here feminism refers to understandings of sexual harassment as stemming from gender inequality, and non-feminist understandings of sexual harassment refer to individualized and degendered violations of rights and power imbalances. Postfeminist literature informs this study in understanding how a feminist issue has been disassociated with gender inequality and individualized. Drawing on this literature, I conducted a content analysis of YouTube videos and the comment sections on these YouTube video webpages to address how the community members responded to the sexual harassment problem. First, how do the YouTubers describe the problem? Second, what explanations for why the behavior is wrong, do the YouTubers use? Options include portraying the issue using a more feminist frame of "gender equality," a post-feminist frame of gender-neutral "consent," or a gender-neutral frame of "power imbalance." Lastly, are there relationships between the YouTubers' position in the community and/or gender, their responses, and positive and negative comments left on the videos? Analysis supports that YouTubers did not connect the issue to feminism and that YouTubers' positions in the community relate to how they politicized the abuse and how much commentator support they received.