Projects 

Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and Digital Sexual Health is a solo-authored monograph that outlines and problematizes the manner by which queer and trans people of color are overly prioritized in public health. Virulent rhetorics names a theory of HIV/AIDS discourses that circulate throughout the lives of queer and trans people of color and ties the virus to the biomedical and epidemiological project of identity. The develops this theory by focusing on the history of the virus as a racializing project, the politics of sexual health as mediated by digital technologies, the cultural logics of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that affix the virus to such identities, and the sociality of the virus amongst those deemed most at risk and how such communities actually contend with prevention and treatment in their own lives. 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, which contributes to a general mistrust and misalignment with public health specifically and science writ large.

Loving Fiber Optic Cables outlines the ways expanding internet infrastructure compels settler colonial expansionism as global communication thresholds likewise increase. The book uses non-standard prose, slanting traditional academic verbiage to produce an affective argument about internet infrastructure that steers the book, wherein the focus is on how we should feel about infrastructure to better think about what we should do with it. The book also argues that we cannot devise a way out of the settler colonial portent of the Anthropocene by relying on analytics formed within intellectual projects that likewise find their velocity within settler colonial thinking; indeed, an animating argument in the book is that we must abandon Western intellectual traditions altogether when future-building, including the Anthropocene, given the ways neo-European intellectual genealogies map onto settler conquest across the world. Affixing Indigenous cosmology to the project, then, Loving Fiber Optic Cables argues that, if we are able to love a cable or otherwise inanimate things by seeing them as alive with organizing principles, then we can better theorize and build around an uncertain future using extant infrastructure. Essentially, the book is a theory-building project at the speculative interface of human / non-human livability; that is, its sole focus is outlining a theory of internet infrastructure that requires human love to collate the human and the non-human to revise settler colonial doom.

In 2024, 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."