Contagion, Quarantine and Constitutive Rhetoric: Embodiment, Identity and the “Potential Victim” of Infectious Disease
- 10 March 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Journal of Medical Humanities
- Vol. 43 (3), 1-21
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09732-7
Abstract
Through a rhetorical analysis of fragments of language used by United States public health experts, victims, and advocates during the early periods of polio, HIV and COVID-19, this project shows how constitutive rhetoric within infectious disease discourse articulates the subject position of potential victim for different publics. The author finds that the analyzed discourse simultaneously calls forth a negative identity that asks people to not become something and also asks for actions to prevent disease spread – and, in doing so, the awakening of potential victim reveals hegemonic assumptions about whose bodies are valued and whose are not.This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
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