Book Projects
Beyond these books, I am working on various other manuscripts, many of which stem from my awards-winning dissertation, Toward a Virulent Community Literacy: Constellating the Science, Technology, and Medicine of Queer Sexual Health. I am happy to present or talk about these projects, either in your class or as a workshop, so please reach out if you feel the need. Check out my other manuscripts (coming soon) →
Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and the Politics of Digital Sexual Health
What happens when we treat the everyday discourses of queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) on social media in relation to their sexual health as a valid, intra-community form of health knowledge and meaning making? To answer this question, Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and the Politics of Digital Sexual Health analyzes social media data of QTPOC intaking sexual health information, gestating it within the purview of their unique experiences, and circulating it as enriched knowledge to other users along the lines of queer of color sensibilities. Virulent Rhetorics argues via a rhetorical analysis of archival materials that such digital communication sequences grassroots traditions of how queer and trans communities of color informed each other of critical information amid the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s. Ultimately, Virulent Rhetorics forwards an eponymous rhetorical concept that actuates a community-based framework of health literacy, rendering communicative events across social media as epistemologically valid health literacy acts.
Loving Fiber Optic Cables: (or The Internet is Land)
How do we fall in love amid Another End of the World? More specifically, how does loving the fiber optic cables that network and cohere for us ever-expanding communicative thresholds in turn revise the settler colonial grammar of apocalypse amid climatological disaster? Loving Fiber Optic Cables (Or The Internet is Land) compiles disparate but interrelated veins of inquiry across Indigenous philosophies, Black Studies, Black and Native Studies, Science and Technology studies, Media and Communication Studies, and Infrastructure Studies for a sustained examination of the cosmological parameters by which digital infrastructure is theorized and problematized. Affixing a perspective shift in how we think of land, its colonized constituents, and the human as a dialogic project amid modernity, Loving Fiber Optic Cables inheres an anticolonial grammar in form and theory, advancing love as a requisite for deliberating over the future while squaring anticolonial energy against the nihilist horizon of whiteness and settler ontology.
Queer (Im)Possibilities in Rhetoric and Writing Studies: Honoring and Extending the Work of Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes
Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes were awarded the CCCC Exemplar Award for their collaborative work, which has been integral to rhetoric and writing studies, particularly in the tracks of queer rhetoric and theories. Indeed, Alexander and Rhodes's collaborative oeuvre has prompted the field to imagine and to reimagine possibilities and impossibilities when interfacing queerness with rhetoric and writing studies, especially in the arenas of digital rhetoric, multimodal composition, and internet studies. They have explored how new media open up possibilities for problematizing sex/gender/sexuality and create possibilities for new representations of sex/gender/sexuality. They have also offered the field definitions and explorations of queer rhetoric.
Following the award and their impact writ large on writing and rhetoric, I am working with Michael Faris (Texas Tech University) on an edited collection wherein contributors consider how Alexander and Rhodes's work has shaped the field and then extend their contributions to new sites, questions, and problems. It will reprint influential works by Alexander and Rhodes and original essays by scholars in the field reflecting on and extending their work, with a focus on how queerness in the field is not simply "difficult" but is "one of composition's impossible subjects."
