![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay develops a theory of the visceral imagination by analyzing the first safe sex manual written in the age of AIDS—How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. At the time of the manual’s publication in 1983, no one knew for certain what caused AIDS. Drawing on the transmission pathways of common sexually transmitted infections and through thick descriptions of the contact between bodily fluids and internal membranes, the manual’s authors, Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, constructed a comprehensive, customizable AIDS prevention framework. In this essay, I argue that these descriptions stabilized the controversies surrounding AIDS transmission by activating what I call the visceral imagination. The visceral imagination supports speculative, non-technical arguments about health with localized, vivid portrayals of the body, its orifices, and its fluids. Analysis of this case study illustrates that the visceral imagination can resist universalizing, curative approaches to biomedical intervention by inviting non-experts to negotiate risk against personalized assessments of bodily permeability. More broadly, a theory of the visceral imagination productively extends recent rhetorical interests in viscerality by illuminating embodied, imaginative practices that queer, grassroots, and other subjugated rhetors might use to resist the homogenizing effects of dominant, normative health discourses.
Acknowledgements
The author extends his sincerest thanks to Karrin Vasby Anderson and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. He would also like to thank Stephanie Larson, John Oddo, and Andreea Ritivoi for reviewing earlier versions of this essay.
Notes on contributor
Ryan Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at Lafayette College.
Notes
1 Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach (New York: News from the Front Publications, 1983), 3, emphasis added.
2 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 9.
3 CDC weekly surveillance reports 1983–1985, December 22, 1983, Box 10. Joseph Sonnabend Papers. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center Archives, New York.
4 Alex Preda, AIDS, Rhetoric, and Medical Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.
5 CDC weekly surveillance reports 1983–1985, December 22, 1983. Joseph Sonnabend Papers.
6 “Current Trends Prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of Inter-Agency Recommendations,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 32, no. 8 (1983): 101–03.
7 Michael Callen, Surviving AIDS (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 6.
8 For more on emotion’s role in scientific persuasion, see Craig Waddell, “The Role of Pathos in the Decision-Making Process: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 4 (1990): 381–400, doi.org/10.1080/00335639009383932.
9 Callen, Surviving AIDS, 6.
10 Robin E. Jensen, “An Ecological Turn in Rhetoric of Health Scholarship: Attending to the Historical Flow and Percolation of Ideas, Assumptions, and Arguments,” Communication Quarterly 63, no. 5 (2015): 523, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2015.1103600.
11 Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 36.
12 Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, and Flis Henwood, “Rhetorics of Health Citizenship: Exploring Vernacular Critiques of Government’s Role in Supporting Healthy Living,” Journal of Medical Humanities 35 (2014): 133, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9276-6.
13 I would like to thank Stephanie Larson for encouraging me to explore theories of viscerality for this project, especially as they relate to the circulation of diffuse affective assemblages concerning embodied and cultural vulnerability.
14 Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle’: The Midcentury Fluoridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506.
15 Stephanie R. Larson, “‘Everything Inside Me Was Silenced’: (Re)defining Rape through Visceral Counterpublicity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 127 and 125, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1447141.
16 Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle,’” 2.
17 Debra Hawhee, “Looking into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 140, https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2011.613288.
18 I use the word repertory in the same way as Charles Taylor to describe the perhaps only half-understood, yet habituated, “collective actions” that are available to given groups in society. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 107.
19 For more on the body’s role in the public sphere see Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563032000160981; Gerard A. Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies: Arguments for Personal Sufficiency and Public Insufficiency,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.1999.11951633.
20 Jennifer Malkowski and Lisa Melonçon, “The Rhetoric of Public Health for RHM Scholarship and Beyond,” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 2, no. 2 (2019): v.
21 Deborah Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 2.
22 Christa B. Teston et al., “Public Voices in Pharmaceutical Deliberations: Negotiating ‘Clinical Benefit’ in the FDA’s Avastin Hearing,” Journal of Medical Humanities 35, no. 2 (2014): 151, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9277-5.
23 Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle,’” 14.
24 Emily Winderman, Robert Mejia, and Brandon Rogers, “‘All Smell Is Disease’: Miasma, Sensory Rhetoric, and the Sanitary-Bacteriologic of Visceral Public Health,” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 2, no. 2 (2019): 115–46.
25 Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 347, https://doi.org/10.1353/par.2003.0006.
26 Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” 351.
27 Catherine Waldby, AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1996), 43.
28 Waldby, AIDS and the Body Politic, 62.
29 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 241.
30 For example, see Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jennifer Malkowski, “Beyond Prevention: Containment Rhetoric in the Case of Bug Chasing,” Journal of Medical Humanities 35 (2014): 211–28, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9280-x.
31 Lupton, The Imperative of Health, 136–37.
32 Bryan J. McCann, “Queering Expertise: Counterpublics, Social Change, and the Corporeal Dilemmas of LGBTQ Equality,” Social Epistemology 25, no. 3 (2011): 253, https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2011.578302.
33 Dean, Unlimited Intimacy, 11.
34 Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 12.
35 Deborah A. Gould. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34.
36 Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 63.
37 J. Blake Scott, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 11 and 10.
38 Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky, “AIDS Activism and the Rejuvenation of the Public Sphere,” Argumentation and Advocacy 31, no. 4 (1995): 165, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.1995.11951609.
39 Debbie Indyk and David A. Rier, “Grassroots AIDS Knowledge: Implications for the Boundaries of Science and Collective Action,” Knowledge 15, no. 1 (1993): 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/107554709301500101.
40 Bonnie J. Dow, “AIDS, Perspective by Incongruity, and Gay Identity in Larry Kramer’s ‘1,112 and Counting,’” Communication Studies 45, no. 3–4 (1994): 225–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979409368426.
41 For more on the public performances of ACT UP and other AIDS activists see Erin J. Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2014); Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87–100; Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.1999.11951634.
42 Alexandra Juhasz, “Forgetting ACT UP,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 69, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638662.
43 For more, see Karma R. Chávez, “ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 63–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638659; Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani, eds., AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
44 Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” chapter 3 in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 64.
45 “A Cluster of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia among Homosexual Male Residents of Los Angeles and Range Counties, California,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 31, no. 23 (1982): 305. For a detailed history of the Los Angeles cluster see Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
46 Richard Berkowitz, “CS People: Joseph Sonnabend,” Christopher Street, December 20, 1982; for more on the multifactorial theory see Joseph Sonnabend, Steven S. Witkin, and David T. Purtilo, “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, Opportunistic Infections, and Malignancies in Male Homosexuals: A Hypothesis of Etiologic Factors in Pathogenesis,” JAMA 249, no. 17 (1983): 2373, https://doi:10.1001/jama.1983.03330410056028.
47 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 3, underlining in original.
48 Hawhee, “Looking into Aristotle’s Eyes,” 159.
49 For more on phantasia’s capacity to facilitate deliberation about the probable, possible, and imagined, see Dorothea Frede, “The Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, eds. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 279–95; Ned O’Gorman, “Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38, no. 1 (2005): 16–40, https://doi.org/10.1353/par.2005.0009; Allison M. Prasch, “Obama in Selma: Deixis, Rhetorical Vision, and the ‘True Meaning of America,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2019): 42–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1552366; Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).
50 Frede, “The Cognitive Role of Phantasia,” 285.
51 Frede, “The Cognitive Role of Phantasia,” 289.
52 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 40.
53 Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience; Michele Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgement Going,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 269–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773941003785678.
54 Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience, 165.
55 Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away,” 270.
56 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 3.
57 Prasch, “Obama in Selma,” 47.
58 Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92.
59 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 3.
60 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 3.
61 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 15.
62 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 3.
63 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 22.
64 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 17.
65 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 18.
66 O’Gorman, “Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric,” 22.
67 Winderman, Mejia, and Rogers, “‘All Smell Is Disease,’” 121.
68 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 14.
69 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 194.
70 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 19.
71 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 15.
72 Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15.
73 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 28.
74 Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 97.
75 Ryan Mitchell, “Decoupling sex and intimacy: The role of dissociation in early AIDS prevention campaigns.” Argumentation and Advocacy 55, no. 3 (2019): 211–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/10511431.2019.1617617.
76 Davin Allen Grindstaff, Rhetorical Secrets: Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance in Contemporary America (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 97.
77 Deborah Gould, “Shame of Gay Pride in Early AIDS Activism,” in Gay Shame, eds. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 235.
78 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 37.
79 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 39.
80 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 34–35.
81 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 37.
82 Callen and Berkowitz, How to Have Sex, 37.
83 Lawrence K. Altman, “New U.S. Report Names Virus That May Cause AIDS,” New York Times, April 24, 1984.
84 “Anal Sex and HIV Risk,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/analsex.html, accessed August 16, 2019.
85 Paula A. Treichler, How to Have a Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 17.
86 Edward J. Koch, “Senator Helms’s Callousness Toward AIDS Victims,” New York Times, November 7, 1987.
87 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano [Enck-Wanzer], “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking ‘the People’ in the Young Lords’ Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638656.
88 Mark Schoofs, “How to Survive Yet Another Plague: I Lived through the AIDS Epidemic. Here’s How to Live through the Coronavirus,” BuzzfeedNews, March 20, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/markschoofs/how-to-survive-yet-another-plague.
89 For critiques of comparisons between COVID-19 and AIDS see Mark S. King, “Stop Comparing the Response to Coronavirus to the Early Response to AIDS. It’s Insulting,” LGBTQ Nation, March 16, 2020, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/03/stop-comparing-response-coronavirus-early-response-aids-insulting/; Theodore Kerr, “How to Live with a Virus,” POZ, March 23, 2020, https://www.poz.com/article/live-virus.
90 Laurel Wamsley and Allison Aubrey, “Coronavirus FAQs: Is a Homemade Mask Effective? And What’s the Best Way to Wear One?” NPR, April 3, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/03/826996154/coronavirus-faqs-is-a-homemade-mask-effective-and-whats-the-best-way-to-wear-one.
91 Mask mandate critics have formed robust social media groups and taken to the streets to protest what they believe are draconian and coercive public health measures that require masks to be worn in public places. For coverage of these protests and reviews of anti-mask mindsets see Julia Marcus, “The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks,” The Atlantic, June 23, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dudes-who-wont-wear-masks/613375/; Ben Decker, “Membership of Anti-Mask Facebook Groups Jumps Sharply,” New York Times, October 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/technology/membership-of-anti-mask-facebook-groups-jumps-sharply.html; Emily Stewart, “Anti-maskers Explain Themselves,” Vox, August 7, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/8/7/21357400/anti-mask-protest-rallies-donald-trump-covid-19; Luke Mogelson, “The Militias Against Masks,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/the-militias-against-masks.
92 Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle,’” 5.