Book Projects

Following up the primary takeaways from my dissertation data analysis, I am drafting a proposal for a book project, comprising six chapters, tentatively titled Virulent Rhetorics: HIV and the Politics of Digital Sexual Health, that expands on the case studies of my dissertation. With this monograph, I do the double work of informing queer and trans BIPOC on how social media can be a health literacy tool while nudging public health officials toward respectful approaches for honoring community health practices. I plan to finalize a book proposal for New York University Press’ “Queer / Trans / Digital” series by January 2024, with sample chapters to be written over Summer and Fall 2023. My current timeline for publication is some time in late 2024 / early 2025. Below, you can find a breakdown of my current plans for the book.

For the introduction, I recount both popular practices of sexual health advocacy and outreach during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis leading to the advent of pre-exposure prophylaxis. The following chapter discusses the mediation of such practices through digital technology use, and I focus on Twitter as a rhetorically versatile site wherein new understandings of health literacy might be best understood given the site’s communicative capacity for a visual, textual, and audio confluence along the lines of queer of color sensibilities. The subsequent chapter recounts how health literacy might be understood in these ways by reviewing how users of color have used the site, different communication modes and popular media to build emergent networks of care as users post and ask questions about their sexual health. The next chapter details why users often take to social media to create these networks as they contend with the material realities of increasingly austere living conditions, racist medical and healthcare policies, and encroaching fascistic and white supremacist legislation, which adversely affect marginalized communities and especially, as I argue, queer and trans BIPOC, whose identities become wound up in a capitalist regime of care. The penultimate chapter offers a guide for users of color on how to disrupt epistemic hubris in healthcare and clinical settings, highlighting rhetorical strategies for leveraging their experiences in both online and offline settings to combat medical racism. The final chapter does similar work but for public health officials and healthcare providers, advancing a reformed health literacy framework to build better healthcare and public health experiences for queer and trans people of color.

Following my article "(Re)Mapping Digital Infrastructure: Toward the Internet as Land," which is currently under review at enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, I am planning a smaller book project with a tentative submission to the "Forerunners: Ideas First" series from the University of Minnesota Press, which publishes "short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead." Tugging further at the cosmological parameters by which we deliberate over digital infrastructure within the purview of writing and rhetoric studies, I plan for this book project to center on three case studies (via Indigenous methodologies), interfacing narrative- and place-based methods to examine the affordances of climate change to digital infrastructure and how, via Wynterian analysis, we might configure an anticolonial cyborg. To do so, I enunciate further the cosmological parameters of the internet as land, fleshing out a means of feeling fiber optic cosmology, a rhetorical-relational means of centering in our projects the cosmological shift made possible by what I term an intercontinental fiber optic love triangle. In activating love as a must for rhetorical theory, I argue ultimately in this book project that we cannot find a way out of the bind as we are imbricated with settler systems that, in turn, preclude the kinds of theoretical moves we need to make to reimagine the future away from settler colonialism's seeming fixity. Thus, with this book project, I index a series of rhetorical moves that signal the need for this cosmological pivot within writing and rhetoric, constellating this argument across internet studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. I am currently drafting the second chapter of this book, which will be workshopped at the 2023 RSA Institute in Pittsburgh, PA, this coming summer. I am also planning for the third chapter to be workshopped at the 2023 Digital IDEAS Summer Institute at the University of Michigan this summer.