Medical interpreters occupy a contradictory position: present at a patient’s most vulnerable moments, they are expected to remain invisible, rendering one language into another without leaving a trace of themselves in the exchange. In Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026), Jonathan Gleason takes that role as both literal subject and critical methodology. Across…
Author: Nicholas Derda
Cuteness as Critique: Diseased Pariah News and the Visual Politics of HIV/AIDS
Images of sexually transmitted infections in public health campaigns have long drawn on tropes related to pollution, contamination, and a decaying society in order to dissuade the public from engaging in “irresponsible” sexual behavior (Brandt 5). From early twentieth-century government posters, such as the one pictured above, that linked disease to gendered and racialized tropes…
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…
Book Review: Blood Loss by Keiko Lane
Blood is an enduring metaphor for heteronormative kinship. However, Keiko Lane, author of the new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art (Duke, 2024), appropriates the image of blood as a symbol for the queer intimacies forged in coalitional AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. The memoir follows Lane as…