Virulent Rhetorics

Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and Digital Sexual Health is a solo-authored monograph that uses the history, politics, and culture of HIV to outline and to problematize the manner by which queer and trans people of color are overly prioritized in public health. Virulent rhetorics are HIV/AIDS discourses that circulate throughout the lives of queer and trans people of color along the 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 an easy epidemiological surveillance that also renders an at-risk identity as risky in the first place (such as cisgender gay Latino, in my case) while over-prioritizing such identities in advertisements for HIV treatment and prevention.

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 technoscientific 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 (i.e., queer and trans people of color) and sexual health developments spurred on by the AIDS crisis until the advent of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (DoxyPEP). The book advances virulent rhetorics as a rhetorical theory of HIV that folds together the practice of public health surveilling and targeting queer and trans people of color with the ways algorithmic sorting has become the de facto method for social media platforms to group together those with similar identities and behavior. Virulent rhetorics thus serve as those HIV discourses that operate algorithmically to circulate tropes of risk and impropriety in relation to queer and trans people of color. Overall, the book argues that, in tracking virulent rhetorics, we can better understand how technological, biomedical, and pharmaceutical developments work in tandem to extend the rhetorical transmissibility of the virus beyond its material capacity for infection given that HIV now always already invokes the identities of queer and trans people of color and that algorithmic sorting likewise always groups such identities together on social media platforms, which now serve as the main way public health targets the so-called at risk while circulating longstanding racial tropes of riskiness.

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, which resonates with the decades-long rhetorical action surrounding health and wellness initiated well before the AIDS crisis of the 1980s up through the 2010s leading to the advent of PrEP and to our current moment. In one notable example within my data, one Twitter user (before the platform became X) used a meme of popular drag queen Shangela Laquifa Wadley 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 (an HIV-prevention medication) scientifically functioned to prevent a new HIV infection. Here, within this social media setting—typically understood as merely the badlands wherein medical mis- and disinformation circulate), is where I locate and develop virulent rhetorics as rhetorical theory. In another example in the same data set, users during a popular sex party in Atlanta, GA, (often called the Black gay capital of the world) leaned on the algorithmic sorting process (in addition to the more typical use of hashtags) to educate other attendees on best practices for safe sex beyond the use of condoms throughout the event.

In that sense, this book is not about the ways HIV discourses lend to lower adoption rates of medication or safer-sex practices according to what I term prophalogics, that is, the ways condoms-only logics misaligns with emergent sexual mores attendant to the advent of PrEP and DoxyPEP. Rather, Virulent Rhetorics argues that rhetorical action emerges in the mundane 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 according to 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 derived from colonial ideologies during the 20th Century in North America.