ABSTRACT
This chapter provides both theoretical orientations and then connects them through their mutual dependence on embodiment and experience into performative phenomenology. It discusses how the methodology can be done and its importance to advancing research methodologies. As a methodology, performative phenomenology captures or records embodied experience in a way that accounts for past and present associations between participants and the multicontextual, multidimensional nature of health care. What performative phenomenology adds to the rhetoric of health & medicine (RHM) is a way to push back against traditional methodologies that have too long put the primary emphasis on texts or that have too often erased or minimized the body when writing to develop more complex and nuanced approaches to embodiment that highlight the lived experiences of research participants. Developing a methodology that captures such embodiment moments is critical to RHM scholarship.
