Virulent Rhetorics

Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and the Politics of Digital Sexual Health is a solo-authored monograph that uses the rhetorical circulation of HIV to outline the material-discursive means by which certain bodies and identities are conscripted by the afterlives of settler colonialism into a risky regime. The book advances virulent rhetorics as a rhetorical framework useful for tracking how late capitalist techno-scientific development, settler colonial bio- and necropolitics, and white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy animate the rhetorical machinations of public health and likewise delimit livability for queer and trans people of color through seemingly benign approaches focused on targeting so-called at-risk populations. As the name suggests, the book constellates across three foci: 1) HIV, that is, the rhetorics of HIV and their circuits, 2) the digital, framed as platform capitalism and late capitalist frameworks of techno-scientific and biomedical development, and 3) sexual health understood as a discrete set of practices developed amongst a relatively cohesive group of people according to their identities. 

The animating research questions of the book are: 1) "How does HIV communication, across its disparate forms and multitudinous circuits, shape livability for queer and trans people of color?” and "What happens when we treat the everyday discourses of queer and trans people of color on social media in relation to their sexual health as a valid, intra-community form of health knowledge and meaning making?" In answering these questions, the book unspools the manner by which identities—such as gay or trans—develop in tandem with the rhetorical project of HIV and AIDS, as well as how such development tarries with it issues of epistemic injustice and medical harm. Indeed, one of the key takeaways of the book centers on the manner by which people who would otherwise be deemed non-experts or unscientific still render complex medical knowledge and navigate the biopharmaceutical-owned terrain of HIV prevention and treatment. In one notable example within my data, one user used a meme of popular drag queen Shangela dressed as a snow globe, likening her red and white costume to that of a red blood cell being protected from HIV. The meme went viral while simultaneously conveying user understandings of how Truvada, and HIV-prevention medication, scientifically functioned to prevent a new HIV infection. Here, within this this everyday, so-called non-scientific discourse, is where I locate and develop virulent rhetorics as rhetorical theory.

Virulent rhetorics are HIV / AIDS discourses that circulate throughout the lives of queer and trans people of color along the triptych of history, politics, and culture, that is, the ways the history of the virus, the politics of sexual health as mediated by digital technologies, and the culture of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy affix the virus to such identities. Virulent Rhetorics argues that the rhetorical proximation of the virus lends to the easy epidemiological surveillance that also renders an at-risk identity as risky in the first place (such as cisgender gay Latino, in my case). In that sense, virulent rhetorics comprise those communicative practices that, together, lend to the rhetorical transmissibility of the virus beyond its material capacity to infect. I develop virulent rhetorics as rhetorical theory via the rhetorical texture of HIV discourses, following Allison Rowland’s concept of zoetropes, Scott Lauria Morgensen's concept of settler colonial biopolitics, Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, and Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco's queer necropolitics. In asking how livability in relation to HIV is shaped by rhetorical action, I focus on the ways the virus’s discourses lend to the broader imaginary of the virus, which streams via anti-blackness and epistemic hubris, in turn forming the rhetorical lattice by which tropes surrounding risk in relation to HIV conscript identity into the historical, political, and cultural imaginary. 

In that sense, this book is not about the ways HIV discourses lend to lower adoption of medication or safer-sex practices. Rather, Virulent Rhetorics argues that rhetorical theory emerges in the extra-ordinary ways that queer and trans people of color recognize the ways their bodies and identities are co-opted into the bio- and necropolitical project of HIV (what I term late capitalist anxiety), rendered to them via visual and textual rhetorics along the intentions of biopharmaceutical companies and governmental entities, and how such groups of people articulate these systems in often under-theorized forms, such as in the form of a meme, a viral thread on a social media platform, or a popular clip on a video-based platform. In this way, the book posits that, if virulent rhetorics form the rhetorical terrain queer and trans people of color must navigate, then they do so by relying on virulent literacies that can only be rendered by pivoting away from popular health literacy frameworks, which were formed at the height of colonial formation in North America.