Before the isolation of HIV in 1984, members of queer sex communities developed robust explanatory frameworks for not only understanding AIDS but also mitigating its possible sociopolitical consequences. These frameworks retooled political values inherited from past modes of sexual health activism to introduce flexible, future-oriented sexual health policies. This essay considers how AIDS commentators working during the first year-and-a-half of the crisis tailored their speculative arguments about appropriate AIDS-era sexual health ethics in ways that attempted to address the enigmatic epidemic’s intersecting medical, political, and sexual crises. Drawing on work that considers the embodied dimensions of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concepts of presence and communion, I argue that, in the absence of clear biomedical information about AIDS, early AIDS commentators devised what I call vernacular policies of feeling. Unlike traditional health policies that rely on empirical evidence, vernacular policies of feeling make present communal ways of sensing risks to stabilize biomedical controversy, induce collective action, and affirm community values. Along with demonstrating how the body serves as a rhetorical resource for those made vulnerable to illness and death, vernacular policies of feeling productively illustrate how non-expert communities construct future-oriented arguments in moments of overwhelming contingency.

Inspired by conversations at the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Institute workshop on Pandemic Rhetoric(s), this dialogue assembles graduate student, early-, mid-career, and established rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and critical health communication scholars to discuss a keyword that has structured political, social, and biomedical thinking about COVID-19: un/precedented. In identifying un/precedented as an organizing temporal rhetoric for the pandemic, we interrogate how recurrent appeals to the pandemic’s novelty both allow for and limit our capacities to meet the pandemic’s tremendous exigencies head-on. Leveraging our unique scholarly and community commitments, we theorize how un/precedentedness 1) becomes complicit in government inaction, 2) (re)asserts conceptual and literal borders, 3) justifies state and national public health mandates, and 4) obscures other historical and contemporary pandemics. We conclude by offering possibilities for interdisciplinary and longitudinal research into the far-reaching effects of contagious disease.