On Not Living With AIDS: Or, AIDS-As-Post-Crisis (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Construction of Truth and the Politics of Life of an AIDS 'Victim'
"The paper is intended to be a historical analysis of the discourses that have shaped the contemporary construction and representations of people living with HIV and AIDS. It will begin first with an examination of early representations of HIV+ gay men. The second will be a similar examination of representations of HIV+ Africans; both are meant to contextualise the theoretical argument that the final section of the paper will make. The analysis of representations of HIV+ MSM will be focussed largely on the media in the US while the second part of the paper will be devoted to examining more academic representations of the pandemic. This section will also argue that a link exists between those representation of the pandemic and colonial representations of African sexuality. The final part of the paper will draw on Foucault’s work on the construction of truth and link that to a discussion of Didier Fassin’s work on what he describes as ‘the politics of life’ to illustrate both the continuity in representation of people living with HIV and AIDS and the arguably misleading and un-helpful construction of a passive and helpless AIDS ‘victim’. The paper will conclude with two arguments, firstly that despite the emergence of new discourses one can still detect the presence of older, problematic discourses in representations of people with HIV and AIDS. Secondly the paper will conclude that an exclusive focus on AIDS ‘victims’ is at best unhelpful and at worst limits the potential for a positive change in the representation people living with HIV and AIDS."
Social representations of AIDS: towards encompassing issues of power
1995
Dominant social representations concerning the origin and spread of AIDS have frequently contained allusions to 'risk groups'. This paper focuses on the social psychological consequences of these allusions for members of one of the 'risk groups': gay men. As part of a wider study, depth interviews were conducted with a sample of British and South African gay men, a number of whom had HIV/AIDS. They were prompted to talk about where HIV/AIDS originated, how it spreads and which groups are worst affected by it in their own country. The representations contained in the mass mediated AIDS campaigns were examined in parallel to the analysis of lay thinking. Many of the gay men echoed the 'you get what you deserve' ethos which circulated in their social world, blaming their in-group and themselves for AIDS. However evidence of a spoiled identity was accompanied by signs that mechanisms which were being used (consciously and unconsciously) to manage this identity. These mechanisms ranged from active group empowerment, to idealisation and externalisation of AIDS. These interrelated mechanisms can be recast as forms of resistance to dominant social representations of AIDS. This paper aims to highlight the importance of power in the formation of dominant versus resistant social representations, since it has been underrepresented in the literature to date.
Framing rights and responsibilities: accounts of women with a history of AIDS activism
BMC International Health and Human Rights, 2011
Background: In South Africa, policy with respect to HIV/AIDS has had a strong rights-based framing in line with international trends and in keeping with the constitutional overhaul in the post-Apartheid era. There have also been considerable advances since 1994 towards legal enshrinement of sexual and reproductive health rights and in the provision of related services. Since HIV in this setting has heavily affected women of reproductive age, there has been discussion about the particular needs of this subgroup, especially in the context of service integration. This paper is concerned with the way in which HIV positive women conceptualise these rights and whether they wish and are able to actualise them in their daily lives.
Abjection. Objection. Subjection: rethinking the history of AIDS in Australian gay men's futures
Culture, health & sexuality, 2017
In coining the term 'post-AIDS' some 20 years ago, I was noting the dissolution of a singular and unified experience of HIV and AIDS for gay communities that had been the case until that time. Not only were HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men having increasingly different experiences, but divergent trajectories were opening up. Since then, many other factors have come into play, for example age and generation; the ascendancy of the biomedical and the technosexual; and the supremacy of neoliberal politics (including sexual politics). Now, if gay men are to survive as such - and there is a question about this - are there larger issues than HIV and AIDS that ought to command our attention? Or do we need to rethink how we situate HIV and AIDS within the larger framework of gay men's health and wellbeing. This might be just a question of politics, or it could be a question of theory. Are we finally returning to the original gay liberation agenda of the eradication of differ...
Reframing AIDS Narratives: New Perspectives on AIDS in Positive and Voices
International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2024
The present paper investigates the shift in fictional representation of AIDS as manifested in Michael Saag's Positive: One Doctor's Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System and Susan Ball's Voices in the Band: A Doctor, Her Patients, and How the Outlook on AIDS Care Changed from Doomed to Hopeful. It explores how the two novels, through their fresh and vivid representation of the patients, redress relevant stereotypes through a semi-documentary, fictional revisiting of their winding routes. It also covers the ways both novels portray the very process of the disease contraction and treatment, and the patients' attempts to cope with it in a balanced manner that invests the documentary as a strategy for braiding the scientific and the literary in the representational process. The overall purpose is not to normalize the disease but rather to help deconstruct the stereotypical image of it in mainstream media and revisit the negative historical, social, and religious associations of it through the selected novels. For this purpose, the "doculiterary" approach is used as an analytical and evaluative critical method to explore the representation of AIDS in the selected novels.
Politics as Avoidance: Death, Illness, and the Meanings of HIV/AIDS
2017
This paper explores ideas about which I've felt strongly since the 1980s-and which have organized some of my feelings, thoughts and research around HIV/AIDS and its cultural/psychological aspects. However, the paper generated its own problems, a set of doubts and disagreements with myself. This is because, in the six months, and especially the six weeks, before the paper was completed (the night before it was presented in Rome), I had a disorienting set of-let's call them changes in my health status: my own error resulted in having to change to a more toxic HIV combination of medications, then there was blood in my urine, suddenly poor test results-all of which left
The mothers: contesting health-illness status and cultural authority in the age of AIDS
Nature HSSC, 2024
Despite the relevance and prevalence of research that produced knowledge about stigmatised groups and communities throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in the United States, studies that investigated the relationship between HIV/AIDS, intersectional stigma, and healthillness status among groups considered hegemonic are incipient-i.e., heterosexual, and white groups, who did not suffer stigma due to sexuality and race/colour, for example. In this study, such a gap is examined in order to observe the effects of stigma in non-exposed communities. Additionally, the article (i) explores the formation of a pioneering group of caregivers in New York City, the Mothers of Patients with AIDS (MPWA), created in 1986; and (ii) analyses narratives about health disease from a collective care agenda established by middle-aged and elderly mothers dealing with the challenges and needs of adult children and people with moderate and high degrees of dependence. This study is part of a larger project that investigated the emergence of non-profit organisations and gerontology care groups in the context of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. Documentary research was developed in the Florence Rush collection, made available by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The selected materials bring together qualitative empirical sources from reports, personal histories, and interviews conducted by Florence Rush and other mothers, social workers, and health professionals. As the results attest, the narratives produced by Florence Rush's interlocutors during the AIDS health crisis make it possible to understand how social and cultural dynamics of recognising the disease did not result in autonomous, individual, and objective processes for exposing the pathological state. The strategic use of the term "cancer" instead of "AIDS" as an umbrella definition, and one less demarcated by aspects involving gender and sexual behaviour, evidenced the sociality of the illness. Conclusions show how negative representations were associated with AIDS-perceived as harmful, immoral, or deviant behavioursand produced new meanings and demands among patients who feared stigmatising classifications in the midst of sexual panic until the commercial availability of the antiretroviral cocktail in 1997.
2019
How are politics and life narratives in the fields of HIV/AIDS activism entangled? This exhibition explores different ways of living politics from the perspectives of a variety of countries, communities and regions. It focuses on the ways in which lives are shaped by politics, and politics are shaped by lives in Poland, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany and on the European level. The World Health Organisation has identified Europe as a region with the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world. While the impact and spread of the virus unfolds differently and unevenly across the region, it has evoked multiple responses from civil society, religious institutions and European states and governing bodies. A multiplicity of lives and politics demonstrates that the fight against HIV/AIDS cannot be recounted as a single coherent story. Instead, it is presented here as an ongoing struggle with many disparities and a-synchronicities - all of which take on unique expression in each political, le...