Rhetorics of Cunning Care Mapping Collective Mētis in LGBTQ+ Community Health Practices
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Abstract
This article examines how LGBTQ+ people in South-Central Florida navigate HIV disclosure laws through shared forms of adaptive reasoning that emerge in response to stigma, criminalization, and institutional constraints. Drawing on qualitative interviews and rhetorical analysis of Florida’s HIV disclosure statutes, the study develops the concept of collective mētis, a communal form of adaptive intelligence through which marginalized groups generate and circulate situated knowledge to manage risk, intimacy, and legality. By theorizing collective mētis, the article offers a framework for understanding how marginalized populations create protective communicative infrastructures that resist punitive systems while sustaining ethical relationships, mutual support, and community-based forms of care. The concept of collective mētis extends rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship by offering a new lens for understanding how communities generate, circulate, and enact adaptive rhetorical knowledge in response to health, legal, and social constraints.
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