Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (review)

In Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing, J. Blake Scott provides a richly nuanced critique of scientific and popular discourses on HIV antibody testing in the United States. This book has much to offer its reader, both politically and academically. In the first instance, Scott's analysis succeeds admirably as a critical intervention, demonstrating the harmful material effects that flow from the identity-based rhetoric on HIV antibody testing and offering powerful alternatives to conventional pedagogy, policymaking, and testing programs. Risky Rhetoric also expands rhetorical theory in significant ways by integrating cultural studies. Risky Rhetoric is a must for scholars of public discourse, generally speaking, and for those investigating the HIV/AIDS crisis, more specifically.

Following the premise that the discourse on HIV antibody testing constitutes a disciplinary rhetoric, Scott argues:

Testing and its procedures not only diagnose individuals and groups as infected or uninfected but also as risky or clean, threatening or safe, deviant or normal . . . These distinctions often do more harm than good, stigmatizing certain people as risky bodies to be guarded against and symbolically deflecting risk away from those who view themselves as normal but who nonetheless engage in practices that put them at risk for HIV.

(9)

Risk, thus conceived, is rhetorically associated with identities rather than with modes of conduct, a perspective that has damaging effects for both individual citizens and the social institutions that intend to provide relief from the HIV/AIDS crisis. Chapter 1 makes a compelling case for revisiting these cultural practices and systematically establishes the interdisciplinary perspective of the book, making the project accessible to a diverse readership.

Chapter 2 makes a strong case for reshaping the rhetoric of science by importing questions and perspectives from cultural studies. Cultural studies, Scott observes, "accounts for the entire circuit"—underlying conditions, textual rhetorics, material effects—of a cultural practice (21). Although previous rhetoric of science scholars have borrowed from cultural studies, they have often attended to one line of inquiry while excluding others. Scott's work contributes a more fully integrated approach, expanding the range of questions and problems that cultural critics of science can address. Unlike previous research, Scott's study of HIV antibody testing as a cultural practice recognizes the influence of extra-rhetorical forces, engages the ethical questions inherent to scientific practice, and maps the intertextuality of scientific and social productions of knowledge. Crossing cultural domains, connecting various rhetorical texts, and recognizing a diverse set of social actors, intertextuality gives insight into the larger discourse on HIV antibody testing and its influences. Risky Rhetoric thus evidences the rhetorically potent relationship between materiality and social knowledge. The remaining chapters of the book present critical analyses of the discourse on HIV antibody testing, illuminate the multiple rhetorical tools that build a particular scientific perspective on HIV antibody testing, and discuss the ideological and material consequences of such a worldview.

Chapter 3 performs an archaeology of the public health discourse on HIV antibody testing, excavating both medical publications and the popular press. Historically speaking, HIV risk has always been framed in terms of identity categories (gay men and IV drug users, for instance) rather than in terms of specific conduct, and the public discourse on HIV antibody testing has repeatedly verified these associations between identity and risk. Following a substantive critique of public health discourse, Scott concludes: "[P]ositing certain groups as the sources and vectors of HIV positions them more as risky or threatening than as at risk, facilitating policies that primarily seek to detect and contain rather than engage and empower them" (87). This chapter goes a long way toward unpacking the rhetorical operations that produce this kind of social-political positioning, specifically the knowledge enthymeme and the scales topos. The knowledge enthymeme presumes that HIV antibody testing guarantees individual behavior change and enables effective health care. Scott demonstrates the fallacies of these presumptions: the limited access to health care...