Jordynn Jack

Jordynn Jack's book, Science on the Homefront: The Rhetoric of Women Scientists in World War II, was published by the University of Illinois Press (2009).  It won a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada doctoral fellowship and the 2006 James Berlin Memorial Dissertation Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Her next book project, Gender and the Rhetoric of Autism, takes up the network of gendered arguments that shape debates about autism. Initially portrayed as a disorder caused by emotionless “refrigerator mothers,” autism is now recognized a neurological disorder that is itself highly gendered: the Center for Disease Control in America reports that boys are seven times more likely than girls to develop this disorder, and one prominent researcher, Simon Baron-Cohen, has hypothesized that autism is a disorder of the “extreme male brain.” This project takes up both the gendering of autism in scientific and public discourses, as well as the gendered positions interlocutors use to establish expertise and authority in debates about autism.

She has also conducted research on Kenneth Burke, on rhetoric and public memory, and on women’s rhetorics.