This article explores the ethical complexity of inclusion, exclusion, and protection in TPC, drawing upon a historical technical document, The Green Book, which helped Black American travelers in the 1930-60s locate safe leisure spaces in a segregated society. We examine The Green Book through the antiracist thinker Kendi to understand some of the ethical limits of the binary of inclusion/exclusion and identify necessary forms of protection for historically- and multiply-marginalized groups.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

Technical communication has long acknowledged that documents can be unethical and even oppressive and harmful. But not all forms or experiences of oppression are equivalent or similar, and it can be instrumental to analyze in particular how certain groups are wounded by specific documents. In this article, the authors use Ahmed's queer phenomenology to analyze institutional and government documents and demonstrate the ways that these technical documents create failed orientations. Then, through a focused analysis of a federal proposal policy, they show how these documents can produce failures for trans people in particular. The authors close by suggesting courses of actions for redressing these failures.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

This article examines how empty state pages (ESPs) constrain user-generated communication through the ethical lens of Bourdieu’s habitus. The authors define ESPs as interactive instructional templates that prompt users to input information to participate in an online network. Through a case study analyzing ~450,000 online comments from The New York Times, the authors find a direct connection between ESP elements, such as the character limit for comments, and online writers’ cultivated habitus.

Given the barriers for transgender people to access affordable gender-transition care, online environments have witnessed a rise in user-generated instruction sets providing direction on the self-administration of hormone therapy. These ethical forms of tactical technical communication demonstrate the need to consider a new materialist approach to queer theory, which refuses to align queer agency with stable identities. Drawing directly from these user-generated instructions, this article articulates a theoretical framework for queer, tactical technical communication.

Certain aspects of social justice research tacitly work from political frameworks of “passive equality.” Passive equality can limit a technical communicator’s ability to enact social justice in terms of (a) signaling the presence of an injustice and (b) waiting for the organization, institution, or state to make the correction (e.g., liberalism’s distributive justice). By contrast, this article foregrounds the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière as a way to cultivate a practice of “active equality” that enables technical communicators to enact social justice rather than wait for institutional redistribution.

Tactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.