Books Forum: Confronting the AIDS Epidemic (original) (raw)
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Cristiana Bastos contrary to some grim predictions regarding its future as a branch of knowledge associated with vanishing worlds and with colonialism, anthropology is alive, well and perhaps more politically engaged and theoretically vibrant than ever. Furthermore, ethnography and fieldwork remain its core and method. They had to adjust to the novelties, to new settings, new spatial definitions, new research agendas, new forms of interaction with the subjects, new sources of data. But, rather than succumbing to or being submerged by the methods of other disciplines, fieldwork and ethnography evolved and often became tools for other social sciences as well.
Epidemic Imaginary: Performing Global Figurations of "Third World AIDS
Space and Culture, 2006
This article is a narrative experiment written in the hope of illuminating "Third World AIDS" less as a geographically situated pandemic than as dispersed and dispersing encounters of mobile figurations. Using HIV/AIDS in Thailand as a case, the author argues that to move beyond the dominant understanding of "Third World AIDS" today-influenced mainly by epidemiology and anthropology-we need to attend to a mobile mediascape that manages to bypass the medicoethnographic sphere to invest in discursive encounters, awaiting framing and materialization. As such, this article posits the performative movement of figurative imagination as an alternative materiality, one that engages with the "diseased other" ethically and postnationally. While AIDS rages on in the 21st century, the narrative/figurative encounters staged in this article continue to present an uneasy picture about nation, gender, (queer) sex, activism, and power.
How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures
In this paper, I critique contemporary AIDS narratives of historiographic heroism that flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines. I ground my arguments about AIDS gentrification through a critique of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) not simply to offer a " corrective " account of AIDS history that fills in missing gaps, but to intervene into the representational terms of AIDS historiography that has crucial bio-political and epidemiological implications in contexts that are not limited to the Global North. More specifically, I critique the redemption of biomedical discourse in contemporary AIDS narratives, examining its implications in the context of a transnational political economy that continues to mediate HIV drug access and affordability for people living with AIDS in the Global South (specifically, the political economy of India). I conclude my paper with a global focus of early AIDS activisms— both in the sense of a broader vision of coalitional politics as well as a transnational impetus—that moved beyond a drugs-into-bodies goal, which has come to dominate the representational field of AIDS history since 2010. These queer refusals of single-issue politics are in danger of being whitewashed if pos-itivist versions of AIDS discourse lay claim to the " truth " about the epidemic's historiography. At stake is not simply the need to proliferate and assert different versions of activist histories as more authentic, but to mobilize these alternative archival mediations to challenge the gentrification of AIDS in the Global North.
Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS (in AIDS and the Distribution of Crises)
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, 2020
Chapter 8 of the volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke UP 2020), co-edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani. “Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS” is a dialogue between artists, activists, social service providers, and scholars Cecilia Aldarondo, Roger Hallas, Pablo Alvarez, Jim Hubbard, and Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyễn, with an Introduction by Jih-Fei Cheng. The conversation figures between individual and collective experiences with HIV/AIDS. Recorded here is pain, fury, resentment, fear, determination, and more. The first prompt for this asynchronous set of “dispatches” commenced in September 2016. The second prompt was initiated in December 2017 and registers the anxiety and impassioned responses to what was then the new election of US president Donald Trump. Whether their edges are left coarse or worn soft, these memories of AIDS refuse to be resembled—to look exactly like one another or simply reflect one another. They also refuse assembly into a singular or coherent past. We trace these memories of shattered pasts with our fingertips. We struggle to love and hold each other with barriers; we struggle to love and hold each other without barriers.
The Social Construction and Social Representation of HIV: An Anthropological Study
Social Medicine, 2017
Background: The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a public health concern that affects men, women, and children. The virus does not just infect individuals, it affects all of society. It fosters a restructuring of daily life and of social spaces that changes the day to day life of those infected with the virus. In this way the disease acquires a set of meanings that emerge from incomplete and often unconscious ideas about the virus and about how HIV develops. As a result is is often depicted as a terrible monster capable of decimating entire societies. Research Question: This paper presents an analysis of the life styles, experiences and conceptions of a group of ten men living with HIV infection in Mexico. Methods: In order to develop a rich understanding of how the virus managed to occupy our subject's very existence we used qualitative methods which put the emphasis on the voice of the patients living with the virus. Interviews were carried out to identify how men...