Rhetorical Analysis Of A Whisper Of Aids

By stating facts, gaining sympathy, and giving her audience a speaker they can trust, Fisher gave one of the most memorable and effective speeches in history. At the end of her speech, she called for her audience to take action. She provided words of inspiration and developed a care for victims of AIDS and HIV in the listener’s hearts. She begins her speech with her saying, “I would never have asked to be HIV-positive” (Fisher). However, since she is HIV-positive, Fisher decides to accept it and look at it as an opportunity to make a change. Fisher’s speech would have been not nearly as powerful if she didn’t have HIV herself. Mary Fisher believes that AIDS shouldn’t be a whisper. She wants to get it out there as a topic of discussion instead of everyone acting uncomfortable when it’s brought up. Fisher’s main purpose is to raise awareness, but not only of AIDS and HIV. She wants to raise awareness and change the way people with AIDS and HIV are treated. She goes about doing so by publically speaking wherever she can and hoping that it sinks in. She hopes that eventually, AIDS and HIV can be studied well enough and understood globally. Most importantly, Mary Fisher hopes for a

Any speech tries to persuade the audience to accomplish the goal of the speaker. There are multiple modes of persuasion. These modes include Logos and Pathos. Logos is the actual evidence and argument whereas pathos is the speakers appeal to the audience’s emotions. In Mary Fisher’s 1992 Republican National Convention Address also known as “A Whisper of AIDS” Fisher speaks to America about the seriousness of HIV and AIDS. Fisher uses both logos and pathos to appeal to the audience. She urges America to take action by using evidence and experiences to promote emotions and certain attitudes to her audience.

The film describing an ordinary woman Noerine Kaleeba devoting herself fighting social stigma around AIDS in Uganda is a powerful scene. Her personal account of seeing her husband dying from AIDS propelled her to fly to Geneva to meet with Jonathan Mann, the leading researcher in the global AIDS program. When she arrived at the WHO building, she was rejected to meet with Mann. However, her emotional response caught Mann’s attention and when she sat down with Mann, he told her that her husband is going to die. But Mann asked Kaleeba “there is a prejudice that is attached to this disease that we have to fight, and will you help me fight it?” Kaleeba later became the co-founder of the AIDS activism group “The AIDS Support Organization,” a group that provides care, support and counselling as well as community education for prevention in Uganda. In this scene, Jonathan Mann recognized an important social factor of the disease which is that AIDS is attached to a serious stigma and discrimination. Due to the fact that there is

“We live in a completely interdependent world, which simply means we cannot escape each other. How we respond to AIDs depends, in part, on whether we understand this interdependence” Bill Clinton spoke these words to an ever-changing, and ever-accepting nation. This idea of interdependence, no matter how evident, was a concept many people In the late 80’s could not grasp. The war on AID’s first started in 1981 when the first case of aids was diagnosed in the U.S. but it wasn't until Clinton took presidency in 1993 that the nation took this epidemic to heart. For over 10 years this outbreak that killed over 70 million was overlooked by many religions and government officials that turned there heads due to the judgment they would receive when affiliating themselves with the lgbt community.

Fisher uses statistics about HIV/AIDS to both inform and play on the audience’s fears. She tells the audience HIV/AIDS “does not care whether you are Democrat or Republican; it does not ask whether you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight, young or old.” The use of the majority (white, male, and straight) invites them into the discussion and subtly blames them for the epidemic. The speech might have run the risk of creating villains out of the audience, but Fisher manages to pull back at the right moments and refocus her audience on spreading awareness.

Harris explains that theses exertions became a matter of life and death during the early 1980s when predominately male African-American male congregants, pastors and other church members became sick from an unknown illness which later became recognized as the autoimmune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has a superfluous effect on the black community. African-Americans accumulate nearly half of most HIV and AIDS diagnoses. The delayed response of black leaders to the epidemic was another factor that incited the highly prevalent rates of HIV and AIDS cases within the African-American community. Along with affected gay men, prostitutes and intravenous drug users became infected as well; Harris further reports that those people were considered “degenerates” and “immoral” by black church leaders. Trailing back to the days of slavery, black religious leaders assisted as freedom fighters of social justice for oppressed African-Americans. Those affected with the disease looked to religious leadership for spiritual support and to bring the disease to light. However instead of the desired support, they were faced with disdain and denunciation at the lifestyle as black leaders believed caused the individuals to be affected with the disease. Furthermore, Harris addresses that many gay men who died from the disease were restricted from being buried beside their home churches. This

Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Glaser, at their respective political conventions, take a stand to speak to the American public in an attempt to bring AIDS into the light. Throughout their speeches, Fisher and Glaser convey their thoughts on how the government should appropriately handle this disease. Glaser begins her speech by giving us background information about how she contracted AIDS. After telling her tragic story she recounts the many times she tried to get help for AIDS research by going to the government. Three times in total Glaser “shouted” for help, but still “nothing happened”, and it was only after the third time she realized they didn’t hear because “they don’t want to listen”.

Fisher’s purpose of her speech was to inform the world about AIDS by using Logos, Pathos, and Repetition. Imagine being looked at as if you’re not human because you suffer from AIDS. Now think about how people deal with this disease everyday. Fisher who has AIDS explained to the Republican party that over two hundred people are dead or dying and over a million people are infected by this fatal disease. Anyone can have AIDS it doesn’t matter what gender, race or age you are.

HIV is a detrimental disease in the African-American community. During the 1980s HIV was on the rise as many people were uneducated about the virus itself and how the virus was contracted. Precious contracted HIV from her mother's boyfriend, which is more difficult to handle when you live in a state of poverty. Precious had limited funds and limited health care options. If an individual contracts HIV in 2016 there are medications that can prolong their life and keep them comfortable unlike the resources available in the 1980s. According to Rao and colleagues, African-Americans face many downfalls with HIV due to difficulty accessing proper care and medication (2016). Rao address that there is a stigma associated with HIV, as well as African-Americans,

HIV/AIDS, was a disease with social stigma due to its association with the gay community. However, after the rise of sexual liberation starting in the 1960s, the fear of homosexuals became more concrete, as sexuality was discussed more openly[footnoteRef:35]. Historically a disease was viewed in both social and cultural terms, and the ill can be viewed as being caused by perversions from societal norms[footnoteRef:36]. This happened with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For conservatives, HIV/AIDS was a justified specter, one that could be vindicated as “God’s Judgement” and as a crackdown on the “heinous lifestyle”[footnoteRef:37]. Because HIV/AIDS was so concentrated in particularly deviant groups, the logical linkage of the disease to the gay lifestyle was easy. “Gays (IDUs) chose to be gay (and drug injectors) of their own will. A Supreme Court decision in June 1986 reinforced the moral

What makes Fisher a credible person to speak on the subject is the fact that her herself is HIV positive which means she know the everyday problems and can share the reality of the terrible disease. She understands that it will eventually make her sick enough to where she will pass away and she deals with that fact everyday and she is able to put all of that in her speech and it makes it so much better.

In Ireland there was a campaign after the outbreak which used the slogan “Don’t bring home AIDS”, it was very much believed to be a foreign disease. A character in Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship (1999) points out, the problem AIDS ‘did not exist’ because “we don’t talk about sex” (1999: 146). In the novel Helen feels that her brother has excluded his family from his life, Helen and her brother might once have been close but she came to feel he “had replaced his family with his friends”, meaning his gay friends (Tóibín

AIDS is a worldwide epidemic that has affected and is affecting millions of people. Even though it was not discovered until 1982 many stereotypes have come along with it. Mary Fisher is an AIDS community member and is not afraid to stand up and say so. Defending and helping those with HIV/AIDS and helping them spread the word instead of keeping silent. In 1991 she found out that she had contracted the disease from her second husband and now Fisher is one of the world’s leading activists in the fight against HIV/AIDS. (Newman, 2010)

During her speech at the Republican National Convention, Fisher persuades Republicans to stop the prejudice toward HIV/AIDS victims and inform people about how to prevent further spreading of the virus. Fisher contrasts republican ideas of loving “ justice” and “children” but ignoring “injustice” and teaching children to highlight that people choose to focus on the positive good and ignore the flaws of society along with the responsibilities of the individual in holding society accountable. Fisher appeals to the Republicans’ stigma in wanting love and justice and choosing to ignore the injustice and fear that HIV/AIDS has brought toward those with the virus. In addition to that, Fisher repeatedly notes that “If you believe you are safe, you are in danger...” in order to clearly state that no one is safe from being exposed to HIV/AIDS in order to encourage white republicans to participate in preventing the virus from spreading and victimizing people, including rich, white Americans because now they’re scared it could happen to them. Through her emphasis on her ideas almost emphatically, Fisher is able to persuade Republican Americans to fight against the prejudice toward those with the virus and inform children about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent it.

In the 1980s and 90s, women who face the HIV epidemic often had to go at it alone. As the media portrayed the disease a one for gay, white males, women were often left without knowledge of the disease and without knowledge of how to keep themselves safe. Along with that, women also had to deal with the discrimination of doctors who didn’t want to treat those with HIV or didn’t want to treat those who didn’t want to accept their form of treatment. For example, Isle Groth, in her tale Bright Candles in the Dark, was swept aside after she told her doctor at the hospital that she didn’t want to partake in the AZT. Additionally, women also had to deal with being married and believing that they are not at risk. They would never think to worry if