Duty and pleasure in Brouwer’s HIV rhetoric

ABSTRACT

In this short essay, we read Dan Brouwer's scholarship on HIV rhetoric through the philosophical lens of hedonics, a branch of ethics that preoccupies itself with the relationship between duty and pleasure. In doing so, we draw attention to the corporeal, affective, and symbolic dimensions of pleasure inherent in his writings. We gesture toward three ethics cultivated from Brouwer's work: an ethics of legibility, of multiplicity, and of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Brouwer
• HIV rhetoric
• community engagement
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 James Chesebro, “Ethical Communication and Sexual Orientation,” in Communication Ethics in an Age of Diversity, ed. Josina M. Makau and Ronald C. Arnette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 139.

2 Daniel C. Brouwer, “From Vernacular to Official – and the Spaces in Between,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 2 (2014): 183, https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.2.0181.

3 Daniel C. Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 361, https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180500342860.

4 Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” 357.

5 Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” 356–59.

6 Daniel C. Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1998): 115, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462939809366216.

7 Daniel C. Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt’s Search for a Homeland,” in Remembering the AIDS Quilt, ed. Charles E. Morris III (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 161–86.

8 Daniel C. Brouwer and Charles E. Morris III, “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 168, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.1905868.

9 Brouwer and Morris, “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS Memory,” 176.