AIDS and the Distribution of Crises

About this book

"AIDS and the distribution of crises is an edited collection bringing together queer theory, media studies, Black studies, and more to show what AIDS scholarship looks like when AIDS has become a crisis made ordinary. While notions of crisis readily mapped onto privileged bodies, populations of color-still disproportionately affected by AIDS-are rendered outside of a state of emergency, their deaths normalized. With "the AIDS crisis" re-emerging in historical memory as a coherent past moment, contributors to this volume insist on considering HIV/AIDS as an ongoing scattering of many local and specific crises, structured by enduring colonial, racialized, and gendered violence. They ask what activists and scholars can take from earlier theorizations and modes of action around HIV/AIDS and set an agenda for the next decades of scholarship, tracking what new forms have emerged and are emerging, requiring different kinds of organizing and critique. The contributions to the collection take multiple forms. The book features three "Dispatch" sections in which artists, activists, and scholars respond to prompts from the editors, highlighting a multiplicity of approaches to questions of globalization, periodization, and temporality. In addition to the dispatches, there are nine essays, as well as a foreword by Cindy Patton charting the book's place in the history of critical work on HIV/AIDS, and an afterword by C. Riley Snorton placing it in conversation with the landmark cultural studies text Policing the Crisis and contemporary abolitionist politics. Many of the essays highlight the inextricable relationship between HIV/AIDS as a globalized health phenomenon and the local instantiations of disease. For example, Viviane Namaste refuses the early locating of AIDS in North American white gay male communities, providing an alternative history from the Haitian community in Montreal. Marlon Bailey's contribution contrasts an ethnographic account of the communal ethic of self-care among Black men at sex parties with their pathologized "unsafe" sexual practices. And Andrew J. Jolivette invokes the concept of post-traumatic invasion syndrome (and the importance of communal healing) to connect "at risk" behaviors among queer and Two Spirit populations and his own narrative of living with HIV. This book will be of interest to scholars of HIV/AIDS as well as to readers in gender and sexuality studies, LGBTQ history, media studies, the health humanities, cultural studies, and critical ethnic studies"--