Dr. Brian J. Troth // “Le passé est passé. The future is now.” These temporal adages, for all intents and purposes platitudes uttered without much thought, suggest that we are obsessed with moving forward, going so far as to prematurely announce the impossibility that the future has already arrived. Yet we are also apt to…
Tag: HIV/AIDS
How can HIV-positive women be good mothers?
Sasheenie Moodley // We are told that a “good mother” is the trope of a mother who is loving and nurturing (Chess, 1982; Mercer, 1985). She prioritises and protects her infant. This mother has a good relationship with her “happy” infant (Benedek, 1959). It is a good mother’s job to understand her child’s behaviour and…
The Risks We Take: How to Talk About Risk Today
Dr. Brian J. Troth // Is risky behavior exciting and sexy? If we believe this to be true, then what happens when risk becomes harder to define, harder to pinpoint? In the year 2019, the risk of becoming HIV-positive is more mitigated than ever before thanks to a revolutionary preventative approach called PrEP. Critical regard…
Archiving the Sick Body
Cristina Robu // Defining the body as a “political archive,” the philosopher Paul B. Preciado calls it “somathèque”[1] (French for “somatic chronicles”): a registry of power-relations, cultural constructs, events, drives, and narratives or, as Preciado puts it, a “living archive of political fictions.”[2] Through this lens, we might understand the sick body as a site…
“Mirror Work” and the Epidemic Imaginary in New Queer Cinema
Jenelle Troxell // In the closing image of Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, Carol White gazes deeply into the mirror, softly voicing the words, “I love you. I really love you. I love you,” as the camera pushes slowly towards her. While the inward tracking promises access to Carol’s interiority and her direct address to…
Medicine in the Archive: Exploring Feminism and Nursing
John A. Carranza // Being a historian comes with no better rite of passage than to enter the archive. Regardless of the time period or topic chosen by the researcher, sorting through the documents is exciting for me because I am able to engage in an imaginative and interpretative exercise where I consider why a…
Illness as Muse and the Poet-Physician: Rafael Campo’s Comfort Measures Only
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Rafael Campo. Comfort Measures Only: New & Selected Poems, 1994-2016. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. “Illness is a problem for the human imagination only insomuch as we might seek dispassionately scientific methods to cure it while we avoid the inevitably destructive pressures it exerts on our fragile psyches.” – Rafael…
Gay Health Activism and the State: A Review of Katie Batza’s “Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s”
John A. Carranza // In 2009, I joined the San Antonio AIDS Foundation (SAAF, pronounced “safe”) as a volunteer. I graduated with my BA in history the previous year and had a job with a flexible schedule that allowed me to engage in this work. I was drawn to the organization because of its history of…
The Politics of Outing and AIDS Activism in the 1980s
John A. Carranza // “Archibald Anson Gidde, a prominent San Francisco realtor and social leader, died Tuesday at his home in Sea Cliff after a bout with liver cancer. He was 42./Mr. Gidde was a witty and flamboyant figure who distinguished himself by spearheading some of the City’s most notable real estate transactions…/A member…
Tales of the City as Primary Source: AIDS, Fiction, and History
John Carranza Contemporary understanding and empathizing with minority groups, such as the gay and lesbian community, requires historically grounded knowledge. For example, the AIDS epidemic became a defining moment in gay and lesbian history. The disease due to its complex and lethal nature, bewildered and stumped scientists, causing death to loom large over the gay…