Title: Graduate Student
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Email: rmitchel@andrew.cmu.edu
Twitter: @ryled_up_
Description of your work
My research considers the circulation and uptake of intimacy within biomedical controversies and crises. More specifically, I am interested in how experiences of embodiment, sensation, and desire inform large scale sexual health initiatives. These interests are reflected in my dissertation project, Private Parts/Public Selves: The Co-construction of AIDS Prevention before the Discovery of HIV, which traces the invention of AIDS prevention protocols in the years before and immediately after the isolation of HIV as AIDS’ etiological agent. This project articulates my larger argument that to understand the contemporary controversies that adhere to safer sex education programs, we must account for and historicize the fraught rhetorical processes by which intimacy becomes medicalized as it moves among diverse publics. To support this argument, I enlist diverse methods and methodologies. While my analytic apparatus is informed most directly by work from rhetorical history, I also utilize argument, queer, and critical discourse analytic theories and methods to follow discursive constructions as they move, mutate, and accumulate within and across a variety of sites. Increasingly, my focus is shifting to the intersections of sexual health rhetoric, marketing, and gender, with a specific narrowing in on the strategies by which pharmaceutical companies sell sexual enhancement drugs.