On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan’s dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push back against totalizing, dehumanizing discourses of HIV/AIDS prevention. According to Ryan's analysis of texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s 1983 manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, the success of these texts’ rhetorical strategies depended heavily on their viscerality -- their illumination of subjects' lived, bodily experiences of porousness and permeability -- to both illustrate and justify various intersubjectively-oriented safe sex protocols. Ultimately, Ryan argues, texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s served to protect urban gay men from the worst ravages of the disease while also, crucially, affirming their communal identities and agency. 

After talking through the major rhetorical concepts Ryan employs in his work, we shift into a discussion of how this all might relate to current discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As Ryan wisely reminds us, no two disease crises are identical, and there are many mismatches between the early years of HIV/AIDS and where we are currently. Even still, as we discuss, the rhetorics that Ryan has studied emphasize the visceral embodied experiences of those most victimized by public health crises while also promoting social practices, norms, and policies to foster intersubjective ethics of care -- all of which may be worthy of consideration as we navigate the social and political upheaval of our present moment.

Works Referenced in this Episode

Cazdyn, E. (2012). The already dead: the new time of politics, culture, and illness. Duke University Press.

Hauser, G. (2012). Prisoners of conscience : moral vernaculars of political agency. University of South Carolina Press.

Hawhee, D. (2011). Looking into Aristotle's eyes: Toward a theory of rhetorical vision. Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14(2), 139-165.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.

Kennerly, M. (2010). Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(3), 269–291.

Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.

Mitchell, R. (2019). Decoupling sex and intimacy: the role of dissociation in early AIDS prevention campaigns. Argumentation and Advocacy, 55(3), 211-229.

Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.

Rowland, A. L. (2020). Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. Ohio State University Press.