My research examines the processes by which extra-discursive, situated, and bodily knowledges come to shape experiences of being at risk. Whereas traditional rhetorical scholarship has understood risk to be a socially constructed phenomenon, my work seeks to illuminate the materialities of risk by locating its emergence within dynamic assemblages of bodies, pathogens, things, affects, and environments. I am particularly committed to studying how concepts like vulnerability and immunity materialize in and through intersubjective, site-specific embodied performances.

To date, these interests have guided my work on the construction of sexual health risk, especially as it relates to the prevention of sexually transmitted infections and the regulation of sexual practices. Using methodologies from rhetorical studies of health and medicine, rhetorical history, public sphere theory, argument theory, as well as queer and feminist science and technology studies, I construct case-driven rhetorical histories that investigate how the sexual body transforms into a site of invention for non-experts to make arguments concerning corporeal integrity, social belonging, and political identity. My current book project, AIDS and Embodied Risk: The Invention of Safe Sex before the Discovery of HIV, articulates these concerns by studying queer community responses to the North American AIDS crisis before HIV was identified as the syndrome’s causal agent in 1984.

Due to its historical grounding, it offers clarity to contemporary concerns about disease prevention and suggests an alternative framework for envisioning risk and mutual accountability in the face of infectious disease. For instance, my article “‘Whatever happened to our great gay imaginations’: The invention of safe sex and the visceral imagination,” develops a theory of the visceral imagination by showing how recurring, accumulating allusions to viscous body fluids and porous internal membranes helped outsider AIDS activists construct and credential a speculative framework for AIDS risk reduction. In a recent essay I conduct phenomenological analyses of spontaneous anti-mask protests in the United States, arguing that the haptic experience of masking materializes Covid risk by jolting wearers into perceiving themselves as being in permeable communion with an unknowable viral environment. These works explore how fluctuating relationships among the sensorium, biomedical knowledge production, and biopolitical governance structure everyday perceptions of virality and immunity. In doing so, they contribute to a growing catalogue of medical rhetoric scholarship that combines theories of affect with feminist new materialisms to theorize the multiple ontologies of health and illness. After the publication of AIDS and Embodied Risk, I will turn to my next book project, tentatively titled “The Pharmaceutical Penis: Medicalization and the Manufacturing of a Wounded Masculinity,” which uses the disability studies concept of curative violence to consider how contemporary medical discourses about cis male bodies circulate the notion of a wounded masculinity in need of pharmaceutical intervention.