Rhetoric, community and meaning: writing the HIV/AIDS crisis

Abstract

"Rhetoric, Community, and Meaning: Writing the HIV/AIDS Crisis" explains how people living with HIV and AIDS use writing to make sense of their lives. In September 1998, the first of five workshop groups began writing in Tarrant County, Texas, a project that lasted for nine months. Based upon my ethnographic research, I explain that HIV/AIDS writers call upon a variety of rhetorical strategies in restructuring realities disrupted by illness. While detailing the service learning project's design and evolution, I focus on the theoretical underpinnings that make the workshops rhetorical, community-building, and meaning-making enterprises. Using contemporary notions of rhetorical situation, genuine dialogue, and trust, I explain in detail the groups' operations, focusing on dialogic activities that ultimately enhance individuals' efforts to reach meaningful levels of understanding about their lives, their illness, and their positions in the world. In rhetorically analyzing specific texts that writers produced during the project's duration, I show how participants rely heavily upon metaphor, life stories, confessionals, and activist writing in restructuring their versions of reality. In addressing HIV and AIDS, participants call upon clusters of metaphors, consistently viewing their illness in terms of punishment, power, time, and nature. In expressive texts that focus on identity, writers most often turn to nature and domestic metaphors in explaining how they view themselves and their places in the world. Autobiographical narratives prove to be the most democratic rhetorical strategy as everyone has the ability to tell or write a story. By and large, participants' life stories fall into three categories-- safety, survival, and awareness-- as they connect past events with current realities in making more meaningful determinations of their lives. Confessionals-- stories about the most emotional, traumatic events in people's lives-- provide opportunities for release, as participants explore the therapeutic possibilities of writing. Relying upon my own theory of confessional rhetoric, I explain how narratives of abandonment, abuse, and desire help HIV/AIDS writers negotiate persistent urgencies. In considering how workshop participants develop voices that reach beyond their HIV/AIDS communities, I focus on activist writing efforts. These texts-- normally in the form of letters, appeals, and expository responses-- address specific concerns of those living with HIV and AIDS. Additionally, writers speak out about general issues such as sex education and stereotyping of HIV/AIDS-infected individuals. These activist writing efforts support a distinctly Augustinian rhetorical focus on educating the uninformed and promoting charity among all people, a worldview that ultimately supports the entire project.