Hailey Nicole Otis
Assistant Professor, Communication
Education
Ph.D., Communication ( Rhetoric and Civic Engagement), Colorado State University
Research Expertise
Rhetoric
Dr. Hailey Nicole Otis is a critical rhetorical scholar committed to social justice and leveraging the tools of communication and rhetoric toward advocacy and worldmaking. Her research draws from intersectional feminist theory, queer theory, fat studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism to investigate the embodied and intersectional rhetorical tactics through which activists, advocates, influencers, and social media users envision and bring into being more liberatory worlds for multiply marginalized bodies.
Her primary research topic coalesces around digital forms of contemporary intersectional fat activism and this work has been featured on top paper panels in both the Feminist and Women’s Studies division of the National Communication Association (NCA) as well as the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC) division of the Western States Communication Association. Another line of Hailey’s research explores how marginalized groups (specifically those in fat and disabled bodies as well as bodies of color) engage in worldmaking against the backdrop of healthist COVID-related discourses that render certain lives disposable and unlivable.
Hailey has received multiple Excellence in Teaching Awards and her essay, “Intersectional Rhetoric: Where Intersectionality as Analytic Sensibility and Embodied Rhetorical Praxis Converge,” earned the Stephen E. Lucas Debut Publication Award from NCA in 2020. Her research appears in outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women’s Studies in Communication, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.
Hailey is committed to innovative, social justice-oriented approaches to teaching and learning and has developed and presented a variety of pedagogical workshops on topics such as anti-ableist pedagogy and disability justice as well as abolitionist and anti-racist pedagogies.
Publications
Lizzo’s intersectional visibility politics: contesting colonial beauty standards and dismantling the white heteropatriarchal gaze
Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity.
Author/Lead: Hailey Nicole OtisThe body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.
Covid and Fatphobia: How Rhetorics of Disposability Render Fat Bodies Unworthy of Care and Life
Covid and...How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory.
Author/Lead: Hailey Nicole OtisCovid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic (Michigan State UP, 2023. Edited by Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland and Jennifer Malkowski) is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.
Contributions include:
"Introduction: An Agenda for Pandemic Rhetoric," Allison L. Rowland, Emily Winderman, and Jen Malkowski
Part One: Pre-existing and Chronic
"Covid and Racialized Myths: Pre-existing Conditions and the Invisible Traces of White Supremacy," Raquel M. Robvais
"Covid and Environmental Atmospheres: Pulmonary Publics and Our Shared Air," Sara DiCaglio
"Covid and Science Denialism: The Rhetorical Foundations of US Anti-Masking Discourse," Kurt Zemlicka
"Covid and Vaccine Hesitancy: Tracing the Tuskegee-Covid Straw Man Fallacy as a History Presently Unfolding," Veronica Joyner and Heidi Y. Lawrence
Part Two: Essential and Disposable
"Covid and Essential Workers: Medical Crises and the Rhetorical Strategies of Disposability," Marina Levina
"Covid and Being a Doctor: Physicians' Published Narratives as Crisis Archive," Molly Margaret Kessler, Michael Aylward, and Bernard Trappey
***"Covid and Fatphobia: How Rhetorics of Disposability Render Fat Bodies Unworthy of Care and Life," Hailey Nicole Otis***
"Covid and Intersex: In/Essential Medical Management," Celeste E. Orr
Part Three: Remedy and Resistance
"Covid and Shared Black Health: Rethinking Nonviolence in the Dual Pandemics," DiArron M.
"Covid and Masking: Race, Dress, and Addressivity," Angela Nurse and Diane Keeling
"Covid and Disability: Tactical Responses to Normative Vaccine Communication in Appalachia," Julie Gerdes, Priyanka Ganguly, and Luana Shafer
"Covid and Doubt: An Emergent Structure of Feeling," Jeffrey A. Bennett