Erasure: Anti-Black/Trans Public Health Rhetoric

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

Literature and Languages

Date of Award

Summer 8-18-2025

Abstract

My dissertation is a rhetorical proclamation of health as a human right. An ode, explanation, and professional critique of the biased treatment towards Black transwomen and their bodies. This research serves as an examination of public health anti-Black/trans rhetoric and the negative intersectional impacts on Black transwomen. Subsequently, I’ve demonstrated examples of community responses (e.g., fem-queen realness) as not only a central concept but rhetorical marriage of what Frantz Fanon suggests as “conjuring black being in response to whiteness” (82–83) coupled with adapting gender performance. This rhetorical performance raises awareness on how Black transwomen conceptualize remedies for survival in response to social and systematic stigma. I performed this examination through qualitative semi-structured interviewing and textual analysis of public health HIV prevention and care artifacts. In tandem, I supported this research with the adjacent, but uniquely important, disciplinary intersections of gender studies, sociology, psychology, behavior, and public health studies. I explored ballroom community critique and dialogue of health and social systems through the lens of Critical Race Theory informed counterstory as a methodology (Martinez), with deep influences from Black trans and queer feminism. My major claim was that public health rhetoric has contributed to the erasure of Black transwomen. To prove this, I examined “stigmatic tools” used in HIV prevention, care programs, and public health initiatives that explicitly outlined, almost exclusively, the risk factors for cis-men who identified as men who sleep with men (MSM). This is dually characterized by absent and stigmatic language unsupportive of Black transwomen and the world’s labeling of AIDS as a “gay man’s disease” which greatly contributed to results specific to increased HIV transmission rates, AIDS diagnoses, and disproportionately negative health outcomes with Black transwomen (see Chapter 2). To counter these erasures, in this dissertation, I outlined the history of HIV prevention and care programs domestically (i.e., in the United States) as well as cultural and rhetorical examples of realness and passability through an examination of Black transwomen in the underground house/ballroom culture. Importantly, I brought the voices and counterstories of Black transwomen into this project to uplift their experiences, illustrate their negative encounters with HIV prevention and care programs, and demonstrate how those experiences support the claim of public health creating pathways to erasure through negative and absent health outcomes. Keywords: counterstory, house and ballroom, fem-queen realness, public health, HIV/AIDS, stigma, erasure, queer theory, queer rhetoric, Black trans-feminism

Advisor

Gavin Johnson

Subject Categories

Social and Behavioral Sciences

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