ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews public health campaign literature, and describes the Get Checked Omaha (GCO) campaign. The complexities of audiences suggest public health officials and advertising agencies face a difficult rhetorical situation. Affective rhetoric is a powerful means by which othered bodies are shunned to the margins of society. Abjective and disgusting rhetorics marginalize pathologized bodies, casting them to the margins. GCO’s billboards show bodies with sexually transmitted infections (STI) on a grander scale, using the public’s visual contact with warts, sores, and pus to generate affective rhetoric—exploiting disgust as a vehicle to show these bodies as abject. The chapter argues these billboards utilize affective rhetorical appeals of disgust and abjection, promoting feelings of shame, which reify social stigmas around STIs. The need to expel the danger of STIs gains urgency because the threat lies at the heart of a basic social interaction: the functions and pleasures of sex.
