Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and the Politics of Digital Sexual Health is a solo-authored book project that compiles archival materials with social media data to advance a public health assessment framework attuned to intra-community communication strategies and sexual health practices. Its animating argument centers on treating the ways queer and trans people of color use social media in relation to their sexual health as an epistemologically valid act. The book project analyzes grassroots public health communication strategies during the height of the epidemic in the 80/90s, mapping how these strategies have become digitally remediated using social media data via three case studies focused on X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, and Instagram. In centering social media platforms, Virulent Rhetorics posits that digital literacy practices complicate traditional notions of health literacy.

Popular public health assessment frameworks typically examine the interplay between health literacy (aligned with outdated alpha-numeracy concepts) and utilize the social determinants of health, which often trivializes and flattens the cultural practices among queer and trans communities of color. However, in pivoting away from risk-based approaches, Virulent Rhetorics posits that such communities have much to say about their own lives and health—and indeed, they have done so for decades—and when attuned to such discourses, more equitable and just public health outreach for HIV prevention can occur.

Virulent Rhetorics foregrounds the humanistic utility of rhetorical inquiry to understand how communication and design shape livability among marginalized communities. Deploying critical vantages from the humanities (i.e., rhetorical studies, internet studies, and cultural studies) and coupling them with the practical affordances of the social sciences (i.e., communication studies, digital and media studies, and sociology), Virulent Rhetorics foregrounds the manner by which queer and trans people of color recognize and speak back to harmful, risk-informed practices via public health messaging, advertisements, and clinical developments and engagements. In that sense, the book speaks to the politics of communicative production, that is, how we position mundane discourses as rich and complex utterances that delimit how power operates and shapes audience perception and life in online spaces, including the ways marginalized communities render that power and speak back to it. Ultimately, Virulent Rhetorics contributes a sexual health literacy framework that allows for outreach via participatory communication design process that incorporates community voices as a form of epistemic justice, that is, a treatment of typically discounted knowledges as valid and valuable.

Deploying methodological approaches via the social sciences (i.e., critical discourse analysis, thematic analysis) and interpretive strategies via rhetorical analysis, Virulent Rhetorics exemplifies the critical power of academic production as a means of legitimating the epistemological power of marginalized communities wherein academic discourses via qualitative research methods spotlights community-born practices through sustained engagement, rigorous analysis, and clearly presented results. As such, rhetoricians at the nexus of risk and health communication, as well as scholars across the health-focused social sciences, will find Virulent Rhetorics a useful model for centering community perspectives and disrupting deficit-based approaches to researching marginalized communities while maintaining rigorous research standards.