Overview

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing's power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called normal subjects as well as those deemed risky. Drawing on classical rhetoric as well as Michel Foucault's theorizing of the examination as a form of disciplinary power, this study explores how HIV testing functions as a disciplinary technology that shapes subjects and exerts power over individual bodies and populations. Testing has largely been deployed to protect those defined as normal members of the general population by detecting, managing, and even punishing those diagnosed as risky (e.g., gay and bisexual men, poor women of color). But Scott reveals that testing's function of protection-through-detection has been fueled in part by faulty arguments that exaggerate testing's interventive power and benefits. These arguments have also created a perception that testing is a magic bullet. By overestimating the benefits of HIV testing and overlooking its contingencies and harmful effects, dominant arguments about testing have enabled a shortsighted public health response to HIV and unresponsive testing policies. Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is to offer strategies to policymakers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.

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9780809324941

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Reviews

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing makes a significant and much needed contribution to reawaken us to a new critical sensibility toward the politics of testing. There is no other book like it. --John N. Erni, author of Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of Curing AIDS

""" In addition to a comprehensive history of HIV testing in the U.S., Scott provides an in-depth analysis of the politics and cultural practices of testing . . . . Clinicians, health care practitioners, educators, policy makers, and communication scholars will benefit from the thorough review of HIV testing and suggested new directions of research."" -- Choice ""This book has much to offer its reader, both politically and academically.""--Rhetoric and Public Affairs ""[This] book reminds us that rhetoric is an optimistic enterprise, hopeful about the potential for positive change. Risky Rhetoric reflects this faith in the transformative power of the strategic use of language.""--Rhetoric Society Quarterly"

Author Information

J. Blake Scott is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the coauthor with Melody Bowdon of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication.

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