DISCUSSING THE UNDISCUSSABLE Reflecting on the "End" of AIDS (original) (raw)
Related papers
HIV/AIDS and U.S. History (Interchange, co-authored)
Journal of American History, 2017
Emerging in the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) ravaged minoritized communities across the country and in the process transformed the United States. In this “Interchange,” the writers focus primarily on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and communities of color, groups that make up the majority of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the United States, as a way to explore social, cultural, and political battles over recognizing the significance of AIDS and for access to treatment and prevention. The epidemic, and those affected by it, transformed public discussion of sexuality and race, poverty, and public health. But despite those radical changes, HIV/AIDS has rarely been included in the history of the post-1960s era. Working with Jennifer Brier, the JAH brought together nine scholars to discuss how the history of HIV/AIDS intersects with the history of the United States. Participants engaged in a far-ranging conversation that interweaves histories of sexuality, race, gender, medicine, social activism, and media, and explores how HIV/AIDS has been addressed, and ignored, in historical scholarship of the late twentieth century. As the first feature-length piece dedicated to the history of HIV/AIDS published by the Journal, this “Interchange” is able to delve deeply into many critical aspects of the history of HIV/AIDS but misses many others. The JAH and all the contributors hope this piece sparks and sustains new historical research across the many axes of the field of U.S. history. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for sharing their thoughts on this subject. JONATHAN BELL is a professor of U.S. history at University College London. He is the author of The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (2004) and California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (2012). His current project, “Unhealthy Bodies: Health Care and the Rights Revolutions since the Sixties,” examines civil rights activism and health care politics to explore the sexual and gender dynamics of U.S. health care. Readers may contact Bell at jonathan.bell@ucl.ac.uk. DARIUS BOST is an assistant professor of sexuality studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the forthcoming Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. He is the coeditor of a special issue in the Black Scholar titled “Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability.” Readers may contact Bost at dbost@sfsu.edu. JENNIFER BRIER is an associate professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (2009) and the curator of “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture,” a traveling exhibition for the National Library of Medicine. She currently directs a public history project on HIV/AIDS called “I'm Still Surviving: A Women's History of HIV/AIDS in the United States.” Brier was the guest editor for this Interchange. Readers may contact Brier at jbrier@uic.edu. JULIO CAPÓ JR. is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017). He is currently writing a book that places the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in the long history of violence, erasure, and displacement of queer Latina/o/x communites. Readers may contact Capó at capo@history.umass.edu. JIH-FEI CHENG is an assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He is working on a book tentatively titled “AIDS and Its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination.” He worked in HIV/AIDS social services and was a board member of Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment. Readers may contact Cheng at jcheng@scrippscollege.edu. DANIEL M. FOX is the president emeritus of the Milbank Memorial Fund. He is the author of Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy (1993) and The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States (2010), the coeditor of AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (1992). He has served in three federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services. Readers may contact Fox at dmfox@milbank.org. CHRISTINA HANHARDT is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013). Her current project looks at the historical relationship between sexuality-based social movements and antipoverty movements, and examines in particular how a wide range of activists have taken up, and shaped, the strategy of “harm reduction” most associated with public health advocacy. Readers may contact Hanhardt at hanhardt@umd.edu. EMILY K. HOBSON is an assistant professor of history and in the program in Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and is currently working on a second book that explores the connection between AIDS activism and prison radicalism in the 1980s and 1990s. She is on the governing board of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History. Readers may contact Hobson at ehobson@unr.edu. DAN ROYLES is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. He is the author of the forthcoming book To Make the Wounded Whole: The Political Culture of African American AIDS Activism. He is currently working on an oral history of African American AIDS activists and is building an online archive of materials relating to HIV/AIDS in black communities. He is the book review editor for the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History newsletter and is on the editorial board for OutHistory. Readers may contact Royles at droyles@fiu.edu.
On Not Living With AIDS: Or, AIDS-As-Post-Crisis
Acme an International E Journal For Critical Geographies, 2006
Advances in antiretroviral treatments mean that people are living longer with HIV and that the spectacular and politicitzed deaths characteristic of earlier moments of the AIDS crisis are less prominent. New cultural understandings of AIDS-as-post-crisis see AIDS as a "manageable" illness. A contradiction has emerged between HIV prevention work based on an explicit Othering of the HIV+ body and advocacy programs on behalf of Persons Living with AIDS (PLWA). The space of the HIV+ body, therefore, simultaneously is and is not 'just like everyone else.' This paper offers a reading of "Negative Role Model," a recent HIV prevention campaign aimed at Gay men launched by the New Zealand AIDS Foundation (NZAF) that was an attempt to overcome this contradiction. "Negative Role Model," unlike earlier campaigns that rested upon an image of the PLWA as diseased, sinister and always already dead, sought to provide a positive example of the benefits of remaining HIV-. This attempt to avoid the contradictory representations of the PLWA by shifting the representational burden of prevention work away from the PLWA ultimately fails. Drawing on the work of Douglas 1 Mattew Sothern, 2006.
Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie
Le gouvernemen t federal canadien insiste sur le caractere inclusif des consultations qu'il a menees pour la preparation de son document, La strategie canadienne sur le VIH/sida: ensemble nous irons plus loin. Toutefois, la base epidemiologique sur laquelle repose ce texte a comme effet inevitable de presenter Jes personnes atteintes du VIH OU du sida comme etant « differentes »de la population genera le. Les connotations negatives associees au VIH!sida depuis Jes annees 80 rendent une telle « difference » inacceptable aupres du grand public. Done, au lieu d'integrer le VIH et le SIDA dans une politique generale de sante publique, la strategic federate finit par creer une distance entre la population generate, d' une part, et la maladie et Les personnes qui en sont atteintes, d' arttre part. Par conseqrtent, elle contribue a I' alienation des personnes atteintes drt VIH!sida, tout en permettant art grand public de se considerer a l'ecart des effets de la maladie. Thomas Yingling, in his "AIDS in America: Postmodern Governance, Identity, and Experience," says that the amount of information published about AIDS induces "a vertigo that recalls Kant's category of the mathematical sublime: an overwhelming series of numbers and/or sheer magnitude of information defeats comprehension and induces an abysmal intellectual and epistemological encounter that we mark as the sublime" (1991, 291). In the nearly ten years since Yingling made this observation, the proliferation of material has only continued. Grassroots organizations have continued to help HIV/AIDS sufferers cope with the disease, have fought consistently for governmentally funded research, and demanded human rights; cultural theorists have struggled with the ways in which the disease has been represented; research scientists have discussed various etiologies for AIDS, its viral and clinical components, tracked
AIDS Politics of Representation and Narratives
OnCurating, 2019
This article focuses on an ongoing heritage-making process related to HIV/AIDS memories that began in 1994 at the French National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions (MnATP). It reflects upon the history of this process and some of the complex questions that have been raised, which present ongoing challenges for archivists and curators seeking to represent histories of HIV/AIDS. Between 1994 and 2002, two museum researchers organized preliminary meetings between caregivers, people living with AIDS, activists, artists, museum and archive professionals and academics from different disciplines. During this period, a survey sent to French and francophone museums revealed that cultural institutions were not addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis. The first period of meetings at the MnATP resulted in an acquisition program conceived in contact with the social actors affected and involved in the struggle against the epidemic. From 2002 to 2006 more than 12000 artifacts – objects and documentation – were collected, mainly within community organizations, from 35 countries in Europe and the Mediterranean area. This collecting process aimed to address two lines of inquiry: documenting an important social and political event –new forms of activism, mobilizations, solidarities, new rituals, etc.–as well as preserving and archiving the fragile memories of community organizations which, at that time, were more focused on urgent mobilizations. From its closing in Paris to its opening in Marseilles (between 2006 and 2013), the museum’s energies were largely focused on practical questions related to the collection transfer and the opening of the new institution, rather than the presentation of AIDS artefacts. As a matter of fact this period coincided with a rupture in the relationships between the institution and the source communities, and could be considered one example of a “second silence” surrounding HIV/AIDs in France. In 2013, Mucem opened its doors and immediately, activists from Act Up-Paris asked for new donations. By this time, there was an appetite to publicize such an important collection, and an acknowledgement that it would be impossible to do so without the involvement of social actors engaged in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, especially locally. A plan to imagine an exhibition about the social history of HIV/AIDS was born, meant the beginning of a new period in the heritage-building process. These experiences prompt us to consider how - a plurality of narratives, reflecting a diversity of positions, can best be combined within a specific museum context? What archival, artistic and, ethnographic support and curatorial languages might be necessary? How can a limited exhibition space account for the complexities of scale, geopolitics, temporalities, and knowledge circulation that characterised HIV/AIDS? And how should we involve the most affected communities, which are often stigmatized within and beyond the (institutional) exhibition process? What are the benefits and the costs, both for the museum and those communities, of such a collaboration?
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."