Contagion, Quarantine and Constitutive Rhetoric: Embodiment, Identity and the “Potential Victim” of Infectious Disease

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.