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The African AIDS Epidemic
A History
John Iliffe
Ohio University Press, 2006

A Choice Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates, 2005–2006 

This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.

While Mbeki attributed the causes to poverty and exploitation, others have looked to distinctive sexual systems practiced in African cultures and communities. John Iliffe stresses historical sequence. He argues that Africa has had the worst epidemic because the disease was established in the general population before anyone knew the disease existed. HIV evolved with extraordinary speed and complexity, and because that evolution took place under the eyes of modern medical research scientists, Iliffe has been able to write a history of the virus itself that is probably unique among accounts of human epidemic diseases. In giving the African experience a historical shape, Iliffe has written one of the most important books of our time.

The African experience of AIDS has taught the world much of what it knows about HIV/AIDS, and this fascinating book brings into focus many aspects of the epidemic in the longer context of massive demographic growth, urbanization, and social change in Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History is a brilliant introduction to the many aspects of the epidemic and the distinctive character of the virus.

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AIDS Alibis
Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas
Stephanie Kane
Temple University Press, 1998
AIDS Alibis tackles the cultural landscape upon which AIDS, often accompanied by poverty, drug addiction, and crime, proliferates on a global scale. Stephanie Kane layers stories of individuals and events -- from Chicago to Belize City, to cyberspace -- to illustrate the paths of HIV infection and the effects of environment, government intervention, and social mores. Linking ordinary yet kindred lives in communities around the globe, Kane challenges the assumptions underlying the use of police and courts to solve health problems.

The stories reveal the dynamics that determine how the policy decisions of white-collar health care professionals actually play out in real life. By focusing on life-changing social problems, the narratives highlight the contradictions between public health and criminal law. Look at how HIV has transformed our social consciousness, from intimate touch to institutional outreach. But, Kane argues, these changes are dwarfed by the United States's refusal to stop the war on drugs, in effect misdirecting resources and awareness.

AIDS Alibis combines empirical and interpretive methods in a path-breaking attempt to recognize the extent to which coercive institutional practices are implicated in HIV transmission patterns. Kane shows how th e virus feeds on the politics of inequality and indifference, even as it exploits the human need for intimacy and release.
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AIDS and the Distribution of Crises
Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South.

Contributors. Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Marlon M. Bailey, Emily Bass, Darius Bost, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jih-Fei Cheng, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Roger Hallas, Pato Hebert, Jim Hubbard, Andrew J. Jolivette, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Alexandra Juhasz, Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyễn, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Cait McKinney, Viviane Namaste, Elton Naswood, Cindy Patton, Margaret Rhee, Juana María Rodríguez, Sarah Schulman, Nishant Shahani, C. Riley Snorton, Eric A. Stanley, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler
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AIDS and the National Body
Thomas E. Yingling
Duke University Press, 1997
Thomas Yingling was a rising star in American studies, a leading figure in gay and lesbian studies, and a prominent theorist of AIDS and cultural politics when he died in 1992. AIDS and the National Body is a brilliant excursion into the mind and heart of Yingling, author of the critically acclaimed book, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text. Robyn Wiegman, a friend and colleague of Yingling’s, has collected in this book a selection of his critical and creative work. These previously published and unpublished essays, nonacademic prose, poetry, and letters are a powerful testimonial to the intellectual legacy left by Yingling.
Contemplating the contradictions of individual identity from within a human body adapting to and living within a collective national culture, Yingling delves into such issues as canon formation, poetic theory, and the rhetoric of the body in American popular culture. In addition to Wiegman’s illuminating introduction, the conversation is joined by four other scholars—Michael Awkward, Robert L. Caserio, Stephen Melville, and David Román—whose critical and personal responses to Yingling’s writing weigh in throughout the volume. What emerges is a collection that embodies the particular difficulties of living with AIDS, of outliving someone who has died of AIDS, and of losing prematurely an important thinker.
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The AIDS Bureaucracy
Why Society Failed to Meet the AIDS Crisis and How We Might Improve Our Response
Sandra Panem
Harvard University Press, 1988

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us.

Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis.

She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

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AIDS in Nigeria
A Nation on the Threshold
Olusoji Adeyi
Harvard University Press

Every minute a Nigerian man, woman, or child becomes infected with HIV. Soon Nigeria will be home to more people living with HIV than any other country in Africa. With 5 percent of its inhabitants already infected, Nigeria has reached the critical threshold that can catapult rates to nearly 40 percent of a country's population. The full magnitude of Nigeria's epidemic will be determined by its response now.

AIDS in Nigeria helps guide that response. Written by dozens of the country's leading HIV experts, the book explores the dynamics of the epidemic, analyzes prevention efforts, identifies crucial gaps, and formulates effective strategies for controlling the epidemic. Complementing the experts' words are the dramatic portraits of people whose lives have been forever transformed by AIDS. Their stories reveal the human costs of the epidemic--and the courage required to overcome it.

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AIDS in the World
A Global Report
Jonathan Mann
Harvard University Press, 1992

The impact of the AIDS pandemic on health systems and entire societies in the 1990s will be much more severe than it was in the last decade; up-to-date information about the disease is now crucial. Yet even though readers are deluged by technical publications and popularizations, no single book tracks, on an annual basis, the evolution of the pandemic, its effects, and the worldwide response.

To fill this gap, Jonathan Mann, founding director of the World Health Organization's Global Progam on AIDS and currently director of the International AIDS Center at Harvard University, has assembled a team of experts to produce an unprecedented document for our time. AIDS in the World will synthesize the best possible information, data, and thinking about AIDS into a volume that is destined to become a landmark publication. AIDS in the World will provide a vital guide to rekindling the worldwide assault on AIDS. To ensure that AIDS in the World 1992 is both timely and authoritative, the editors have enlisted the support of an extensive team of researchers, specialists, scientists, writers, and experts to provide a solid basis for new and original thinking on a wide range of topics.

This book reviews the status of the disease, including numbers of AIDS cases and deaths; AIDS and HIV prevalence; mortality rates; links between other infections and HlV breakthroughs in biomedical, clinical, and behavioral areas; prevention and care; legislation and human rights issues; and economic and demographic aspects. AIDS in the World 1992 provides a global assessment for where we are now and where we are headed; it spotlights critical issues and highlights communities and countries that may be especially vulnerable to the dissemination of HIV. With publication scheduled before the VIIIth International Conference on AIDS in July 1992, this work will be indispensable for governments, policymakers, scientists, health care workers, and journalists around the world who will rely on this book to make the crucial decisions of this decade and the next.

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Ancestors and Antiretrovirals
The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.”

In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
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Bleeder
A Memoir
Shelby Smoak
Michigan State University Press, 2013
I am Caucasian, five foot eleven, have sandy brown hair, blue eyes, and am a tender slip of bone. And I am at the hospital.
A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood transfusion at the start of his college career. This devastating and destabilizing news led Smoak to see his world from an entirely new perspective, one in which life-threatening illness was perpetually just around the corner. Set in the 1990s along the North Carolina coast, Bleeder traces Smoak’s quest for love in a world that feels increasingly dangerous, and despite a future that feels increasingly uncertain. From the bedroom to the operating room, and from one hospital to the next, Smoak seeks out hope and better health. Winner of a PEN American Center award for writers living with HIV, Smoak, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, constructs this unforgettable story of life and love against insurmountable difficulties in breathtaking, tightly drawn prose.
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Blood on Their Hands
How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs
Weinberg, Eric
Rutgers University Press, 2017
A few short years after HIV first entered the world blood supply in the late 1970s and early 1980s, over half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with the virus. But this was far more than just an unforeseeable public health disaster. Negligent doctors, government regulators, and Big Pharma all had a hand in this devastating epidemic.
 
Blood on Their Hands is an inspiring, firsthand account of the legal battles fought on behalf of hemophiliacs who were unwittingly infected with tainted blood. As part of the team behind the key class action litigation filed by the infected, young New Jersey lawyer Eric Weinberg was faced with a daunting task: to prove the negligence of a powerful, well-connected global industry worth billions. Weinberg and journalist Donna Shaw tell the dramatic story of how idealistic attorneys and their heroic, mortally-ill clients fought to achieve justice and prevent further infections. A stunning exposé of one of the American medical system’s most shameful debacles, Blood on Their Hands is a rousing reminder that, through perseverance, the victims of corporate greed can sometimes achieve great victory.
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The Boundaries of Blackness
AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
Cathy Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained.

The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates.

More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness.

The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.
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Caribbean Pleasure Industry
Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic
Mark Padilla
University of Chicago Press, 2007

In recent years, the economy of the Caribbean has become almost completely dependent on international tourism. And today one of the chief ways that foreign visitors there seek pleasure is through prostitution. While much has been written on the female sex workers who service these tourists, Caribbean Pleasure Industry shifts the focus onto the men. Drawing on his groundbreaking ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla discovers a complex world where the global political and economic impact of tourism has led to shifting sexual identities, growing economic pressures, and new challenges for HIV prevention. In fluid prose, Padilla analyzes men who have sex with male tourists, yet identify themselves as “normal” heterosexual men and struggle to maintain this status within their relationships with wives and girlfriends. Padilla’s exceptional ability to describe the experiences of these men will interest anthropologists, but his examination of bisexuality and tourism as much-neglected factors in the HIV/AIDS epidemic makes this book essential to anyone concerned with health and sexuality in the Caribbean or beyond.

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The Children Of Africa Confront AIDS
From Vulnerability To Possibility
Arvind Singhal
Ohio University Press, 2003
AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years. A fifteen-year-old in Botswana or South Africa has a one-in-two chance of dying of AIDS. AIDS deaths are so widespread in sub-Saharan Africa that small children now play a new game called “Funerals.” The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage. A project of the Institute for the African Child at Ohio University, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS cuts across disciplines and issues to focus on the world’s most marginalized population group, the children of Africa. Editors Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard join conversations between humanitarian and political activists and academics, asking, “What shall we do?” Such discourse occurs in African contexts ranging from a social science classroom in Botswana to youth groups in Kenya and Ghana. The authors describe HIV/AIDS in its macro contexts of vulnerable children and the continent’s democratization movements and also in its national contexts of civil conflict, rural poverty, youth organizations, and agencies working on the ground. Singhal, Howard, and other contributors draw on compelling personal experience in descriptions of HIV/AIDS interventions for children in difficult circumstances and present thoughtful insights into data gathered from surveys and observations concerning this terrible epidemic.
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Criminalized Lives
HIV and Legal Violence
Alexander McClelland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized. 
 
Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators. 
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Crying for Our Elders
African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS
Kristen E. Cheney
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the disease. But in Crying for Our Elders, anthropologist Kristen E. Cheney argues that these humanitarian groups have misread the ‘orphan crisis’. She explains how the global humanitarian focus on orphanhood often elides the social and political circumstances that actually present the greatest adversity to vulnerable children—in effect deepening the crisis and thereby affecting children’s lives as irrevocably as HIV/AIDS itself.
 
Through ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research with children in Uganda, Cheney traces how the “best interest” principle that governs children’s’ rights can stigmatize orphans and leave children in the post-antiretroviral era even more vulnerable to exploitation. She details the dramatic effects this has on traditional family support and child protection and stresses child empowerment over pity. Crying for Our Elders advances current discussions on humanitarianism, children’s studies, orphanhood, and kinship. By exploring the unique experience of AIDS orphanhood through the eyes of children, caregivers, and policymakers, Cheney shows that despite the extreme challenges of growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, the post-ARV generation still holds out hope for the future.
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Discovering Retroviruses
Beacons in the Biosphere
Anna Marie Skalka
Harvard University Press, 2018

Approximately eight percent of our DNA contains retroviral sequences that are millions of years old. Through engaging stories of scientific discovery, Anna Marie Skalka explains our evolving knowledge of these ancient denizens of the biosphere and how this understanding has significantly advanced research in genetic engineering, gene delivery systems, and precision medicine.

Discovering Retroviruses begins with the pioneer scientists who first encountered these RNA-containing viruses and solved the mystery of their reproduction. Like other viruses, retroviruses invade the cells of a host organism to reproduce. What makes them “retro” is a unique process of genetic information transfer. Instead of transcribing DNA into RNA as all living cells do, they transcribe their RNA into DNA. This viral DNA is then spliced into the host’s genome, where the cell’s synthetic machinery is co-opted to make new virus particles. The 100,000 pieces of retroviral DNA in the human genome are remnants from multiple invasions of our ancestors’ “germline” cells—the cells that allow a host organism to reproduce. Most of these bits of retroviral DNA are degenerated fossils, but some have been exploited during evolution, with profound effects on our physiology.

Some present-day circulating retroviruses cause cancers in humans and other animals. Others, like HIV, cause severe immunodeficiencies. But retroviruses also hold clues to innovative approaches that can prevent and treat these diseases. In laboratories around the world, retroviruses continue to shed light on future possibilities that are anything but “retro.”

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An Epidemic of Uncertainty
Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi
Jenny Trinitapoli
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi that demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known.

An Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Over the duration of a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world.

Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behavior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.
 
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Fatal Advice
How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong
Cindy Patton
Duke University Press, 1996
The American public responded to the first cases of AIDS with fear and panic. Both policymakers and activists were concerned not only with stopping the spread of the disease, but also with guiding the public’s response toward those already infected. Fatal Advice is an examination of how the nation attempted, with mixed results, to negotiate the fears and concerns brought on by the epidemic. A leading writer on the cultural politics of AIDS, Cindy Patton guides us through the thicket of mass-media productions, policy and public health enterprises, and activist projects as they sprang up to meet the challenge of the epidemic, shaping the nation’s notion of what safe-sex is and who ought to know what about it.
There is the official story, and then there is another, involving local groups and AIDS activists. Going back to early government and activist attempts to spread information, Patton traces a slow separation between official advice and that provided by those on the front lines in the battle against AIDS. She shows how American anxieties about teen sex played into the nation’s inadequate education and protection of its young people, and chronicles the media’s attempts to encourage compassion without broaching the touchy subject of sex or disrupting the notion that AIDS was a disease of social and sexual outcasts. Her overview of the relationship between shifting medical perceptions and safe-sex advice reveals why radical safe-sex educators eventually turned to sexually explicit, including pornographic, representations to spread their message—and why even these extreme tactics could not overcome the misguided national teaching on AIDS.
Patton closes with a stirring manifesto, an urgent call to action for all those who do not want to see the hard lessons of AIDS education and activism wasted, or, with these lessons, the loss of so many more lives.
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Fault Lines of Care
Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia
Heckert, Carina
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The HIV epidemic in Bolivia has received little attention on a global scale in light of the country’s low HIV prevalence rate. However, by profiling the largest city in this land-locked Latin American country, Carina Heckert shows how global health-funded HIV care programs at times clash with local realities, which can have catastrophic effects for people living with HIV who must rely on global health resources to survive. These ethnographic insights, as a result, can be applied to AIDS programs across the globe.
 
In Fault Lines of Care, Heckert provides a detailed examination of the effects of global health and governmental policy decisions on the everyday lives of people living with HIV in Santa Cruz. She focuses on the gendered dynamics that play a role in the development and implementation of HIV care programs and shows how decisions made from above impact what happens on the ground.  
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Forget Burial
HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care
Marty Fink
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Finalist for the LGBTQ Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary

Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen families in the present. In unearthing HIV community newsletters, media, zines, porn, literature, and even vampires, Forget Burial bridges early HIV care-giving activisms with contemporary disability movements. In refusing to bury the legacies of long-term survivors and of those we have lost, this book brings early HIV kinships together with ongoing movements for queer and trans body self-determination.
 
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Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction
The Global Burden of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, HIV, Maternal Conditions, Perinatal Disorders, and Congenital Anomalies
Christopher J. L. Murray
Harvard University Press, 1998

From the health risks of sexual activity to those of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth, reproduction constitutes enormous risks to a woman’s health. Ill-health conditions related to sex and reproduction account for 25 percent of the global disease burden in adult women. In sub-Saharan Africa, they account for over 40 percent. The catastrophic effects of reproductive ill-health, however, are not limited to women; for infants and adult men, they inflict 25 percent and 1 percent respectively of the global burden.

This volume offers comprehensive data and detailed discussions of the epidemiologies of three sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and five specific maternal conditions, as well as those of congenital anomalies and perinatal conditions. Projections of the HIV epidemic are provided: by 2020 HIV is projected to double to 2.5 percent of the global disease burden.

Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction will serve as a comprehensive reference for epidemiologists, public health specialists, practitioners and advocates of STD and HIV prevention, and reproductive and neonatal health.

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Heterosexual Africa?
The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
Marc Epprecht
Ohio University Press, 2008

Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS builds from Marc Epprecht’s previous book, Hungochani (which focuses explicitly on same-sex desire in southern Africa), to explore the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed—by anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, colonial officials, African elites, and most recently, health care workers seeking to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This is an eloquently written, accessible book, based on a rich and diverse range of sources, that will find enthusiastic audiences in classrooms and in the general public.

Epprecht argues that Africans, just like people all over the world, have always had a range of sexualities and sexual identities. Over the course of the last two centuries, however, African societies south of the Sahara have come to be viewed as singularly heterosexual. Epprecht carefully traces the many routes by which this singularity, this heteronormativity, became a dominant culture. In telling a fascinating story that will surely generate lively debate, Epprecht makes his project speak to a range of literatures—queer theory, the new imperial history, African social history, queer and women’s studies, and biomedical literature on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He does this with a light enough hand that his story is not bogged down by endless references to particular debates.

Heterosexual Africa? aims to understand an enduring stereotype about Africa and Africans. It asks how Africa came to be defined as a “homosexual-free zone” during the colonial era, and how this idea not only survived the transition to independence but flourished under conditions of globalization and early panicky responses to HIV/AIDS.

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The Histories of HIVs
The Emergence of the Multiple Viruses That Caused the AIDS Epidemics
William H. Schneider
Ohio University Press, 2021

This new collection of essays on HIV viruses spans disciplines to topple popular narratives about the origins of the AIDS pandemic and the impact of the disease on public health policy.

With a death toll in the tens of millions, the AIDS pandemic was one of the worst medical disasters of the past century. The disease was identified in 1981, at the height of miraculous postwar medical achievements, including effective antibiotics, breakthrough advances in heart surgery and transplantations, and cheap, safe vaccines—smallpox had been eradicated just a few years earlier. Arriving as they did during this era of confidence in modern medicine, the HIV epidemics shook the public’s faith in health science. Despite subsequent success in identifying, testing, and treating AIDS, the emergence of epidemics and outbreaks of Ebola, Zika, and the novel coronaviruses (SARS and COVID-19) are stark reminders that such confidence in modern medicine is not likely to be restored until the emergence of these viruses is better understood.

This collection combines the work of major social science and humanities scholars with that of virologists and epidemiologists to provide a broader understanding of the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that produced the pandemic. The authors argue that the emergence of the HIV viruses and their epidemic spread were not the result of a random mutation but rather broader new influences whose impact depended upon a combination of specific circumstances at different places and times. The viruses emerged and were transmitted according to population movement and urbanization, changes in sexual relations, new medical procedures, and war. In this way, the AIDS pandemic was not a chance natural occurrence, but a human-made disaster.

Essays by: Ernest M. Drucker, Tamara Giles-Vernick, Ch. Didier Gondola, Guillaume Lachenal, Amandine Lauro, Preston A. Marx, Stephanie Rupp, François Simon, Jorge Varanda

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The History of Blood Transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
William H. Schneider
Ohio University Press, 2013

This first extensive study of the practice of blood transfusion in Africa traces the history of one of the most important therapies in modern medicine from the period of colonial rule to independence and the AIDS epidemic. The introduction of transfusion held great promise for improving health, but like most new medical practices, transfusion needed to be adapted to the needs of sub-Saharan Africa, for which there was no analogous treatment in traditional African medicine.

This otherwise beneficent medical procedure also created a “royal road” for microorganisms, and thus played a central part in the emergence of human immune viruses in epidemic form. As with more developed health care systems, blood transfusion practices in sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of detecting the emergence of HIV. As a result, given the wide use of transfusion, it became an important pathway for the initial spread of AIDS. Yet African health officials were not without means to understand and respond to the new danger, thanks to forty years of experience and a framework of appreciating long-standing health risks. The response to this risk, detailed in this book, yields important insight into the history of epidemics and HIV/AIDS.

Drawing on research from colonial-era governments, European Red Cross societies, independent African governments, and directly from health officers themselves, this book is the only historical study of the practice of blood transfusion in Africa.

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Hospital Time
Amy Hoffman
Duke University Press, 1997
Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.
Hoffman became central to Riegle’s caregiving when he asked her to be his health-care proxy, and although she willingly chose to do this, she explores her conflicting feelings about herself in this role and about her involvement with Riegle and his grueling struggle with hospitalization, illness, and, finally, death. She tells of the waves of grief that echoed throughout her life, awakening memories of other losses, entering her dreams and fantasies, and altering her relationships with friends, family, and even total strangers.
Hoffman’s memoir gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill and it gives recognition to the role that lesbians continue to play in the AIDS emergency. A foreword by Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, offers a meditation on the politics of AIDS and the role of family in the lives of lesbians and gay men.
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How to Have Theory in an Epidemic
Cultural Chronicles of AIDS
Paula A. Treichler
Duke University Press, 1999
Paula A. Treichler has become a singularly important voice among the significant theorists on the AIDS crisis. Dissecting the cultural politics surrounding representations of HIV and AIDS, her work has altered the field of cultural studies by establishing medicine as a legitimate focus for cultural analysis. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic is a comprehensive collection of Treichler’s related writings, including revised and updated essays from the 1980s and 1990s that present a sustained argument about the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely knowledgeable and interdisciplinary standpoint.
“AIDS is more than an epidemic disease,” Treichler writes, “it is an epidemic of meanings.” Exploring how such meanings originate, proliferate, and take hold, her essays investigate how certain interpretations of the epidemic dominate while others are obscured. They also suggest ways to understand and choose between overlapping or competing discourses. In her coverage of roughly fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic, Treichler addresses a range of key issues, from biomedical discourse and theories of pathogenesis to the mainstream media’s depictions of the crisis in both developed and developing countries. She also examines representations of women and AIDS, treatment issues, and the role of activism in shaping the politics of the epidemic. Linking the AIDS tragedy to a uniquely broad spectrum of contemporary theory and culture, this collection concludes with an essay on the continued importance of theoretical thought for untangling the sociocultural phenomena of AIDS—and for tackling the disease itself.
With an exhaustive bibliography of critical and theoretical writings on HIV and AIDS, this long-awaited volume will be essential to all those invested in studying the course of AIDS, its devastating medical effects, and its massive impact on contemporary culture. It should become a standard text in university courses dealing with AIDS in biomedicine, sociology, anthropology, gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and cultural and media studies.


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If Memory Serves
Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past
Christopher Castiglia
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.

Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing—even recognizing—the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment. Castiglia and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of “ideality politics” in the art of Félix González-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains.

Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s insight that “the possession of a historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide,” Castiglia and Reed demonstrate that memory is crafted in response to inadequacies in the present—and therefore a constructive relation to the past is essential to the imagining of a new future.

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In Changing Times
Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS
Edited by Martin P. Levine, Peter M. Nardi, and John H. Gagnon
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been a major catastrophe for gay communities. In less than two decades, the disease has profoundly changed the lives of gay men and lesbians. Not just a biological and viral agent, HIV has become an opportunistic social invader, reshaping communities and the distribution of wealth, altering the social careers of gay professionals and the patterns of entry into gay and lesbian life, and giving birth to groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation.

The distinguished contributors to this volume discuss the ways HIV/AIDS has changed collective and individual identities, as well as lives, of gay men and lesbians, and how these alterations have changed our perceptions of the epidemic. They cover such topics as the impact of the epidemic on small towns, cultural barriers to AIDS prevention, gay youth and intergenerational relations, and the roles of lesbians in AIDS organizations. This collection provides compelling insights into the new communities among gay men and lesbians and the new kinds of identities and relationships that are emerging from the social and cultural ferment engendered by HIV/AIDS.

Contributors include Barry D. Adam, Lourdes Arguelles, Rafael Miguel Diaz, John H. Gagnon, Gilbert Herdt, Gregory M. Herek, Nan D. Hunter, Peter M. Nardi, John L. Peterson, Anne Rivero, Gayle S. Rubin, Beth E. Schneider, and Nancy E. Stoller.
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Kampala Women Getting By
Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS
Sandra Wallman
Ohio University Press, 1996

What do ordinary women in an African city do in the face of “serious enough” infections in themselves and signs of acute illness in their young children? How do they manage? What does it take to get by? How do they maintain the wellbeing of the household in a setting without what would be considered as basic health provision in an American or European city?

Professor Wallman focuses on women in a densely-populated part of Kampala called Kamwokya. With the help of a team of Ugandans and non-Ugandans, a vivid picture emerges, enhanced by color photographs, sketches and maps.

Women are largely responsible for the management of illness in all members of the family. Young children are at particular risk and the women have to take the first crucial decisions about treatment. Formal health resources are scarce and so they most often resort to an extraordinary range of treatments provided in the informal economy. A holistic picture of all the options that local people recognize is drawn, and an enriched understanding of problems and opportunities for health care in tropical cities emerges.

Multidisciplinary work on sexually transmitted disease is rare, even in this time of AIDS, and the book effectively maps the social contexts of its perception and management. Moreover, it focuses on women as ordinary citizens, selected by residence and not by reference to known medical conditions or high risk behavior. It is important too that the field strategies have encouraged local informants to become active participants in the definition of local problems and their solutions.

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Landscapes of Activism
Civil Society, HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique
Reed, Joel Christian
Rutgers University Press, 2018
AIDS activists are often romanticized as extremely noble and selfless. However, the relationships among HIV support group members highlighted in Landscapes of Activism are hardly utopian or ideal. At first, the group has everything it needs, a thriving membership, and support from major donors. Soon, the group undergoes an identity crisis over money and power, eventually fading from the scene. As government and development institutions embraced activist demands—decentralizing AIDS care through policies of health systems strengthening—civil society was increasingly rendered obsolete. Charting this transition—from subjects, to citizens, and back again—reveals the inefficacy of protest, and the importance of community resilience. The product of in-depth ethnography and focused anthropological inquiry, this is the first book on AIDS activists in Mozambique. AIDS activism’s strange decline in southern Africa, rather than a reflection of citizen apathy, is the direct result of targeted state and donor intervention.
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A Line Drawn in the Sand
Responses to the AIDS Treatment Crisis in Africa
Phyllis J. Kanki and Richard G. Marlink
Harvard University Press

In the nearly three decades since the AIDS epidemic was first recognized, scientists have made tremendous strides in devising treatments for people living with HIV/AIDS. Yet in Africa, where more than 60 percent of HIV-infected people live, treatments remain out of reach for most.

A Line Drawn in the Sand captures the determination of several African nations in tackling the challenge of providing lifesaving antiretroviral therapies to their citizens: Botswana, which has some of the highest HIV infection rates worldwide; Nigeria, whose epidemic threatens to become one of the world’s largest; Senegal, often touted as one of the few countries with a model response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and Tanzania, whose extreme poverty threatens efforts to stem its epidemic.

By emphasizing the dramatic results that investments in AIDS treatments in Africa can bring, the book provides lessons to nations about scaling up their own treatment responses, hope to individuals and communities confronted with the often devastating impact of AIDS, and inspiration to the international HIV/AIDS community.

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Mortal Men
Living with Asymptomatic HIV
Mac Intyre, Richard
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Narrative non-fiction. A novel-like collection of compelling conversations between an HIV-positive nurse and other gay men with asymptomatic HIV. This book transports the reader into an urban world where gay men negotiated their sexuality, mortality, and health care between the decades of heady liberation and AIDS. See "inside flap" below.
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Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic
Richard A. McKay
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Now an award-winning documentary feature film

The search for a “patient zero”—popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas—and fears—about contagion and social disorder.

McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaétan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed—and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero—adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings—as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.
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A Pill for Promiscuity
Gay Sex in an Age of Pharmaceuticals
Andrew R. Spieldenner
Rutgers University Press, 2023
For a generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming sexually active meant confronting the dangers of catching and transmitting HIV. In the 21st century, however, the development of viral suppression treatments and preventative pills such as PrEP and nPEP has massively reduced the risk of acquiring HIV. Yet some of the stigma around gay male promiscuity and bareback sex has remained, inhibiting open dialogues about sexual desire, risk, and pleasure. 
 
A Pill for Promiscuity brings together academics, artists, and activists—from different generations, countries, ethnic backgrounds, and HIV statuses—to reflect on how gay sex has changed in a post-PrEP era. Some offer personal perspectives on the value of promiscuity and the sexual communities it fosters, while others critique unequal access to PrEP and the increased role Big Pharma now plays in gay life. With a diverse group of contributors that includes novelist Andrew Holleran, trans scholar Lore/tta LeMaster, cartoonist Steve MacIsaac, and pornographic film director Mister Pam, this book asks provocative questions about how we might reimagine queer sex and sexuality in the 21st century. 
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A Plague on All Our Houses
Medical Intrigue, Hollywood, and the Discovery of AIDS
Bruce J. Hillman
University Press of New England, 2016
A frightening new plague. A medical mystery. A pioneering immunologist. In A Plague on All Our Houses, Dr. Bruce J. Hillman dissects the war of egos, money, academic power, and Hollywood clout that advanced AIDS research even as it compromised the career of the scientist who discovered the disease. At the beginning of the worldwide epidemic soon to be known as AIDS, Dr. Michael Gottlieb was a young immunologist new to the faculty of UCLA Medical Center. In 1981 he was brought in to consult on a battery of unusual cases: four formerly healthy gay men presenting with persistent fever, weight loss, and highly unusual infections. Other physicians around the country had noted similar clusters of symptoms, but it was Gottlieb who first realized that these patients had a new and deadly disease. He also identified the defect in their immune system that allowed the disease to flourish. He published his findings in a now-iconic lead article in the New England Journal of Medicine—an impressive achievement for such a young scientist—and quickly became the focal point of a whirlwind of panic, envy, desperation, and distrust that played out against a glittering Hollywood backdrop. Courted by the media, the gay community, and the entertainment industry, Gottlieb emerged as the medical face of the terrifying new epidemic when he became personal physician to Rock Hudson, the first celebrity AIDS patient. With Elizabeth Taylor he cofounded the charitable foundation amfAR, which advanced public awareness of AIDS and raised vast sums for research, even as it struggled against political resistance that began with the Reagan administration and trickled down through sedimentary layers of bureaucracy. Far from supporting him, the UCLA medical establishment reacted with dismay to Gottlieb’s early work on AIDS, believing it would tarnish the reputation of the Medical Center. Denied promotion and tenure in 1987, Gottlieb left UCLA for private practice just as the National Institutes of Health awarded the institution a $10 million grant for work he had pioneered there. In the thirty-five years since the discovery of AIDS, research, prevention, and clinical care have advanced to the point that the disease is no longer the death sentence it once was. Gottlieb’s seminal article is now regarded by the New England Journal of Medicine as one of the most significant publications of its two-hundred-year history. A Plague on All Our Houses offers a ringside seat to one of the most important medical discoveries and controversies of our time.
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Plague Years
A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis
Ross A. Slotten, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.

Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.
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Plague Years
A Doctor's Journey through the AIDS Crisis
Ross A. Slotten, MD
University of Chicago Press, 2020

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.

Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.

[more]

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Policing Desire
Pornography, AIDS and the Media
Simon Watney
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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The Political Economy of Stigma
HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities
Ally Day
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Winner, 2022 Alison Piepmeier Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association

In The Political Economy of Stigma, Ally Day offers a compelling critique of neoliberal medical practices in the US by coupling an analysis of HIV memoir with a critical examination of narrative medicine practice. Using insights from feminist disability studies and crip theory, Day argues that stories of illness and disability—such as HIV memoirs—operate within a political economy of stigma, which she defines as the formal and informal circulation of personal illness and disability narratives that benefits some while hindering others. On the one hand, this system decreases access to appropriate medical care for those with chronic conditions by producing narratives of personal illness that frame one’s relationship to structural inequality as a result of personal failure. On the other hand, the political economy of stigma rewards those who procure such narratives and circulate them for public consumption.

The political economy of stigma is theorized from three primary research sites: a reading group with women living with HIV, a reading group with AIDS service workers, and participant observation research and critical close reading of practices in narrative medicine. Ultimately, it is the women living with HIV who provide an alternative way to understand disability and illness narratives, a practice of differential reading that can challenge stigmatizing tropes and reconceptualize the creation, reception, and circulation of patient memoir.
 
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The Pox Lover
An Activist's Decade in New York and Paris
Anne-christine d'Adesky
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-christine d'Adesky remembers "the poxed generation" of AIDS—their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived.

D'Adesky takes us through a fast-changing East Village: squatter protests and civil disobedience lead to all-night drag and art-dance parties, the fun-loving Lesbian Avengers organize dyke marches, and the protest group ACT UP stages public funerals. Traveling as a journalist to Paris, an insomniac d'Adesky trolls the Seine, encountering waves of exiles fleeing violence in the Balkans, Haiti, and Rwanda. As the last of the French Nazis stand trial and the new National Front rises in the polls, d'Adesky digs into her aristocratic family's roots in Vichy France and colonial Haiti. This is a testament with a message for every generation: grab at life and love, connect with others, fight for justice, keep despair at bay, and remember.

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Practices of Freedom
Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS
Simon Watney
Duke University Press, 1994
Since the mid-1980s, Simon Watney has been one of the leading voices in the international field of HIV/AIDS education. His monthly column on AIDS in Britain’s Gay Times is the longest-running column of its kind in Europe, and he is actively involved in HIV/AIDS issues in the United States. His work constitutes a unique dialogue between European and American perspectives on the epidemic. Practices of Freedom brings together for the first time Watney’s pioneering writings on topics ranging from gay men’s Safer Sex education to racist coverage of AIDS in Africa in the international media, from the ethics of clinical drug trials to governmental policies concerning AIDS.
Watney’s voice—neither neutral nor detached—is that of an active and influential participant in the fight against AIDS. He offers a unique view of the ways in which gay men working in community-based organizations have attempted to provide reliable and up-to-date services and information regarding AIDS treatment and health. A leader in insisting on gay men’s entitlements to education, care, and services, Watney was among the first to challenge the "de-gaying" of AIDS service organizations in the late eighties. He also devotes his attention to HIV/AIDS prevention work, research and treatment issues, and the wider cultural politics of the disease, including the role of language, television, and cinema. His analysis of the epidemic as it has unfolded provides a history of many of the major medical and political debates that have defined the course and extent of the crisis.
Practices of Freedom demonstrates the failure of national institutions, from the government to the press, to understand and effectively fight this epidemic, and directs attention to the most urgent needs in American and international AIDS work. It will be an important primary resource, particularly in the United States, where effective community-based HIV/AIDS education tragically has often been neglected.
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Reframing Bodies
AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image
Roger Hallas
Duke University Press, 2009
In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.

Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

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Remembering the AIDS Quilt
Charles E. Morris III
Michigan State University Press, 2011
A collaborative creation unlike any other, the Names Project Foundation’s AIDS Memorial Quilt has played an invaluable role in shattering the silence and stigma that surrounded the epidemic in the first years of its existence. Designed by Cleve Jones, the AIDS Quilt is the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. Since its conception in 1987, the Quilt has transformed the cultural and political responses to AIDS in the U.S. Representative of both marginalized and mainstream peoples, the Quilt contains crucial material and symbolic implications for mourning the dead, and the treatment and prevention of AIDS. However, the project has raised numerous questions concerning memory, activism, identity, ownership, and nationalism, as well as issues of sexuality, race, class, and gender. As thought-provoking as the Quilt itself, this diverse collection of essays by ten prominent rhetorical scholars provides a rich experience of the AIDS Quilt, incorporating a variety of perspectives, critiques, and interpretations.
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The Republic of Therapy
Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS
Vinh-Kim Nguyen
Duke University Press, 2010
The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to “break the silence” and “put a face to the epidemic,” international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.
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Risky Rhetoric
AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing
J. Blake Scott
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing’s power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called healthy subjects as well as those deemed risky.A new afterword to the paperback edition discusses changes in testing technology, treatments, and public health responses in the last ten years. The ultimate goal of Risky Rhetoric is to offer strategies to policy makers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.

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Saturday Is for Funerals
Unity Dow and Max Essex
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. In Saturday Is for Funerals we learn why that won’t happen.

Unity Dow and Max Essex tell the true story of lives ravaged by AIDS—of orphans, bereaved parents, and widows; of families who devote most Saturdays to the burial of relatives and friends. We witness the actions of community leaders, medical professionals, research scientists, and educators of all types to see how an unprecedented epidemic of death and destruction is being stopped in its tracks.

This book describes how a country responded in a time of crisis. In the true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives, we learn of new techniques that dramatically reduce rates of transmission from mother to child, new therapies that can save lives of many infected with AIDS, and intricate knowledge about the spread of HIV, as well as issues of confidentiality, distributive justice, and human rights. The experiences of Botswana offer practical lessons along with the critical element of hope.

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Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health
Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa
Steven P. Black
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health tells the story of a unique Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa, and how they maintained healthy, productive lives amid globalized inequality, international aid, and the stigma that often comes with having HIV. By singing, joking, and narrating about HIV in Zulu, the performers in the choir were able to engage with international audiences, connect with global health professionals, and also maintain traditional familial respect through the prism of performance. The focus on gospel singing in the narrative provides a holistic viewpoint on life with HIV in the later years of the pandemic, and the author’s musical engagement led to fieldwork in participants’ homes and communities, including the larger stigmatized community of infected individuals. This viewpoint suggests overlooked ways that aid recipients contribute to global health in support, counseling, and activism, as the performers set up instruments, waited around in hotel lobbies, and struck up conversations with passersby and audience members. The story of the choir reveals the complexity and inequities of global health interventions, but also the positive impact of those interventions in the crafting of community.
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Stagestruck
Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America
Sarah Schulman
Duke University Press, 1998
In Stagestruck noted novelist and outspoken critic Sarah Schulman offers an account of her growing awareness of the startling similarities between her novel People in Trouble and the smash Broadway hit Rent. Written with a powerful and personal voice, Schulman’s book is part gossipy narrative, part behind-the-scenes glimpse into the New York theater culture, and part polemic on how mainstream artists co-opt the work of “marginal” artists to give an air of diversity and authenticity to their own work. Rising above the details of her own case, Schulman boldly uses her suspicions of copyright infringement as an opportunity to initiate a larger conversation on how AIDS and gay experience are being represented in American art and commerce.
Closely recounting her discovery of the ways in which Rent took materials from her own novel, Schulman takes us on her riveting and infuriating journey through the power structures of New York theater and media, a journey she pursued to seek legal restitution and make her voice heard. Then, to provide a cultural context for the emergence of Rent—which Schulman experienced first-hand as a weekly theater critic for the New York Press at the time of Rent’s premiere—she reveals in rich detail the off- and off-off-Broadway theater scene of the time. She argues that these often neglected works and performances provide more nuanced and accurate depictions of the lives of gay men, Latinos, blacks, lesbians and people with AIDS than popular works seen in full houses on Broadway stages. Schulman brings her discussion full circle with an incisive look at how gay and lesbian culture has become rapidly commodified, not only by mainstream theater productions such as Rent but also by its reduction into a mere demographic made palatable for niche marketing. Ultimately, Schulman argues, American art and culture has made acceptable a representation of “the homosexual” that undermines, if not completely erases, the actual experiences of people who continue to suffer from discrimination or disease. Stagestruck’s message is sure to incite discussion and raise the level of debate about cultural politics in America today.


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Unbecoming
Eric Michaels
Duke University Press, 1997
In 1982, the American-born anthropologist Eric Michaels went to Australia to research the impact of television on remote aboriginal communities. Over the next five years, until his death, he became a major intellectual presence in Australia. Unbecoming is Michaels’s gritty, provocative, and intellectually powerful account of living with AIDS—a chronicle of the last year of his life as he became increasingly ill. Michaels’s diary offers a forceful and ironic rumination on the cultural phenomenon of AIDS, how it relates to his concerns as both an anthropologist and a gay man, and the failure of medical and governmental institutions to come to terms with the disease. Like the AIDS testimony of artist David Wojnarowicz and filmmaker Derek Jarman, Unbecoming provides a view of the AIDS epidemic from a distinctly new vantage point.
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Unstable Frontiers
Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS
John Nguyet Erni
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Unstable Frontiers was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"John Erni's heartfelt and insightful book is a valuable contribution to the study of the cultural politics of AIDS."–Jeff Nunokawa Princeton University

The "cure" for AIDS: The search goes on, keeping pace with our belief that AIDS is incurable. How such a seeming paradox works-and how it may well work against the proper treatment of the disease-is the subject of Unstable Frontiers, a probing, critical look at the cultural politics behind the quest for a cure for AIDS.

This massive commercial and scientific project, John Erni suggests, actually hinges on our contradictory definitions of the disease as curable and incurable at the same time. Drawing on diverse sources, from popular media to medical literature to cultural theory, he shows how the dual discourse of curability/incurability frames the way we think about and act on issues of medical treatment for AIDS. His work makes a major advance in our understanding of—and, perhaps, humane response to—a national crisis.

In his critique of the logic and fantasies underlying the double definition of AIDS, Erni explores a broad range of issues: the scientific paradigm used to develop AZT; the politics of alternative treatment practices, of clinical drug trials, and of AIDS activism; and the notions of time and temporality operating in AIDS treatment science. He also addresses the problematic popular themes, such as "AIDS is invariably fatal" and "Knowledge = Cure."

Unique in its approach to a social and political issue still in the making, the book reveals how AIDS has challenged technomedicine's historical position of authority-and in doing so, recasts this challenge in a powerful and ultimately hopeful way.

John Nguyet Erni is assistant professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. He has published essays on AIDS and is currently working on a book about AIDS in Thailand.

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Victory Deferred
How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America
John-Manuel Andriote
University of Chicago Press, 1999
There is no question that AIDS has been, and continues to be, one of the most destructive diseases of the century, taking thousands of lives, devastating communities, and exposing prejudice and bigotry. But AIDS has also been a disease of transformation—it has fueled the national gay civil rights movement, altered medical research and federal drug testing, shaken up both federal and local politics, and inspired a vast cultural outpouring. Victory Deferred, the most comprehensive account of the epidemic in more than ten years, is the history of both the destruction and transformation wrought by AIDS.

John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nation's most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural
responses to the disease, Victory Deferred artfully blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.

Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.

Victory Deferred draws on hundreds of original interviews, including first-hand accounts from: Virginia Apuzzo, Reverend Carl Bean, Marcus Conant, M.D., John D'Emilio, Anthony Fauci, M.D, Fenton Johnson, Larry Kramer, Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., Armistead Maupin, Walt Odets, Torie Osborn, Eric Rofes, Urvashi Vaid, Timothy Westmoreland, and Reggie Williams.

"[Victory Deferred] is a richly textured account of the rise of the AIDS sector, that though detailed and comprehensive, reads quickly. The thematic organization of the book works especially well. The clear chronology of the events reveals how competing models of service delivery, treatment activism and private-public cooperation were subsumed into a national AIDS movement. The book should prove excellent for teaching or recreational reading."—Jose Gabilondo, Washington Post

"[A] fine history of the epidemic. . . . Andriote shines with chapters on less-covered but no less important subjects, including the multibillion-dollar 'AIDS industry' and private fund-raising groups. He brings together in one place many facts and figures heretofore unsynthesized."—Joe R. Neel, Boston Globe

"While many books have explored aspects of the impact of AIDS, Victory Deferred is among the most comprehensive. Andriote's adroit integration of the personal and the historical results is an illustrative, analytical account of the disease and its impact on the gay civil-rights movement. His depiction of the poignant struggles, heroic responses and resultant social and political gains emanating from AIDS is a perceptive document for our time—relevant to all readers, regardless of their sexual orientation."—John R. Killacky, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[A] well-researched and nuanced portrait of the many lives on which this grave disease has wrought both destruction and transformation."—Publishers Weekly

"Andriote combines broad strokes and telling details in this engaging history of the complicated war against both disease and bigotry."—Library Journal
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Viral Frictions
Global Health and the Persistence of HIV Stigma in Kenya
Elizabeth J. Pfeiffer
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Viral Frictions takes the reader along a trail of intersecting narratives to uncover how and why it is that HIV-related stigma persists in the age of treatment. Pfeiffer convincingly argues that stigma is a socially constructed process co-produced at the nexus of local, national, and global relationships and storytelling about and practices associated with HIV. Based on a decade of fieldwork in one highway trading center in Kenya, Viral Frictions offers compelling stories of stigma and discrimination as a lens for understanding broader social processes, the complexities of globalization and health, and their profound impact on the everyday social lives and relationships of people living through the ongoing HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. This highly engaging book is ideal reading for those interested in teaching and learning about intersectionality, as Pfeiffer meticulously demonstrates how HIV stigma interacts with issues of treatment, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, social change, and international aid systems.
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We Are Having This Conversation Now
The Times of AIDS Cultural Production
Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
Duke University Press, 2022
We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.
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Whose Agency
The Politics and Practice of Kenya's HIV-Prevention NGOs
Megan Hershey
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are ubiquitous in the Global South. Often international in origin, many attempt to assist local efforts to improve the lives of people often living in or near poverty. Yet their external origins often cloud their ability to impact health or quality of life, regardless of whether volunteers are local or foreign.
By focusing on one particular type of NGO—those organized to help prevent the spread and transmission of HIV in Kenya—Megan Hershey interrogates the ways these organizations achieve (or fail to achieve) their planned outcomes. Along the way, she examines the slippery slope that is often used to define “success” based on meeting donor-set goals versus locally identified needs. She also explores the complex network of bureaucratic requirements at both the national and local levels that affect the delicate relationships NGOs have with the state. Drawing on extensive, original quantitative and qualitative research, Whose Agency serves as a much-needed case study for understanding the strengths and shortcomings of participatory development and community engagement.
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