In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more--even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, "Moving Politics" is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.

Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, "Moving Politics" is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

Foreword by Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize for Economics, 1998) Afterword by Kailash Satyarthi (Nobel Peace Prize, 2014) In 2005, Nick Danziger began to create an archive of photographs documenting the lives of women and children in eight of the world's poorest countries. He returned five years later, and again in 2015. Had the United Nation's millennium development goals made a difference to their lives? The stories he tells - in pictures and words - are unforgettable and have created a unique document, one that reveals the uncomfortable truths of a globalised planet. It is full of hope, sadness, pain, anger and beauty. Some of the women and children Nick followed died through sickness and poverty. One has become the most successful entrepreneur her African border town has ever known. Another - who once dreamed of becoming a banker - is now a gang member in the world's murder capital. Yet another has confronted conformists and successfully changed his gender. The book will stand as a permanent record of their courage and humanity, but also as a reminder that much work still needs to be done if these goals are ever to be met. Too many people in India, Cambodia, Zambia, Uganda, Niger, Honduras, Bolivia and Armenia are still living in extreme poverty, without access to the health and education the goals were supposed to deliver.

"The Night Is Young" takes us past the stereotypes of macho hombres and dark-eyed senoritas to reveal the complex nature of sexuality in modern-day Mexico. Drawing on field research conducted in Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, Hector Carrillo shows how modernization, globalization, and other social changes have affected a wide range of hetero- and homosexual practices and identities.
Carrillo finds that young Mexicans today grapple in a variety of ways with two competing tendencies. On the one hand, many seek to challenge traditional ideas and values they find limiting. But they also want to maintain a sense of Mexico's cultural distinctiveness, especially in relation to the United States. For example, while Mexicans are well aware of the dangers of unprotected sex, they may also prize the surrender to sexual passion, even in casual sexual encounters--an attitude which stems from the strong values placed on collective life, spontaneity, and an openness toward intimacy. Because these expectations contrast sharply with messages about individuality, planning, and overt negotiation commonly promoted in global public health efforts, Carrillo argues that they demand a new approach to AIDS prevention education in Mexico.
A Mexican native, Carrillo has written an exceptionally insightful and accessible study of the relations among sexuality, social change, and AIDS prevention in Mexico. Anyone concerned with the changing place of sexuality in a modern and increasingly globalized world will profit greatly from "The Night Is Young."

Winner, 2018 Best Atlantic Published Book AwardA National BestsellerBy the time the AIDS pandemic in Africa had reached its height in the early 2000s, millions of children had been orphaned. In the face of overwhelming loss, the grandmothers of Africa stepped in to hold families and communities together. Author Joanna Henry and photographer Alexis MacDonald visited eight African countries, interviewing and photographing hundreds of grandmothers (including Sarah Obama, Barack Obama's grandmother) who are reclaiming hope and resurrecting lives. The extraordinary images and stories of resourceful women fighting for a better future make Powered by Love an inspiration for everyone.Writes journalist-social activist Michele Landsberg, "We thought we knew what was happening in Africa when the AIDS pandemic raged across the continent, sweeping away 35 million lives. But we never knew it the way this book reveals it, in the shockingly intimate voices of the grandmothers who had to save the abandoned children when no one else was left alive. These voices will leap straight into your heart. Their unguarded faces, in portraits that glow with character, pain and humour, will captivate you."In 2006, the Stephen Lewis Foundation launched a campaign to engage Canadian grandmothers to support their African sisters. The Grandmothers Campaign, now a movement 10,000 strong, has raised over $25 million that has gone directly into the hands of African grandmothers and their grassroots organizations. Powered by Love joins this campaign by telling the story of these indomitable women and by directing all royalties from the sale of the book to African grandmothers raising children orphaned by AIDS.

In this innovative study, Lukas Engelmann examines visual traditions in modern medical history through debates about the causes, impact and spread of AIDS. Utilising medical AIDS atlases produced between 1986 and 2008 for a global audience, Engelmann argues that these visual textbooks played a significant part in the establishment of AIDS as a medical phenomenon. However, the visualisations risked obscuring the social, cultural and political complexity of AIDS history. Photographs of patients were among the earliest responses to the mysterious syndrome, cropped and framed to deliver a visible characterisation of AIDS to a medical audience. Maps then offered an abstracted image of the regions invaded by the epidemic, while the icon of the virus aspired to capture the essence of AIDS. The epidemic's history is retold through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps and icons of HIV, asking how this devastating epidemic has come to be seen as a controllable chronic condition.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism-its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination-was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party's focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers' People's Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent. The Black Panther Party's understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy-and that struggle-continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

Fifteen years ago the AIDS `epidemic' did not exist on the public agenda. In just over a decade the public and official response to the disease has resulted in the development of a whole network of organizations devoted to the study, containment, and practical treatment of AIDS. In this important and original analysis of AIDS policy, Virginia Berridge examines the speed and nature of the official (and unofficial) response to this new and critical historical event. The policy reaction in Britain passed through three stages. From 1981-1986 the outbreak of a new contagious disease led to public alarm and social stigmatization, with a lack of scientific certainty about the nature of the disorder. AIDS was a new and open policy area - there were no established departmental, local, or health authority mechanisms for dealing with the problem. This was a period of policy development from below, with relatively little official action and many voluntary initiatives behind the scenes. This phase was succeeded in 1986-1987 by a brief stage of quasi-wartime emergency, in which national politicians and senior civil servants intervened, and a high-level political response emerged. The response was a liberal one of `safe sex' and harm minimization rather than draconian notification or isolation of carriers. The author demonstrates that despite the `Thatcher revolution'in government in the 1980s, crisis could still stimulate a consensual response. The current period of `normalization' of the disease sees panic levels subsiding as the rate of growth slows and the fear of the unknown recedes. Official institutions have been established and formal procedures adopted and reviewed; paid professionals have replaced the earlier volunteers. The 1990s have seen change in the liberal consensus towards a harsher response and the partial repoliticization of AIDS. In this fascinating and scholarly account, Virginia Berridge analyses a remarkable period in contemporary British history, and exposes the reaction of the British political and medical elites, and of the British public to one of the most challenging issues of this century.

In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always "cooked" during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information-such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers-acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.

The first ever book by music legend and author of the bestselling Me, Sir Elton John: a personal, passionate and illuminating journey of his fight to end the AIDS epidemic. In the 1980s, Elton John saw friend after friend, loved one after loved one, perish needlessly from AIDS. In the midst of the plague, he befriended Ryan White, a young Indiana boy ostracized by his town and his school because of the HIV infection he had contracted from a blood transfusion. Ryan's inspiring life and devastating death led Elton to two realizations: His own life was a mess. And he had to do something to help stop the AIDS crisis. Since then, Elton has dedicated himself to overcoming the plague and the stigma of AIDS. He has done this through the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised and donated $275 million to date to fighting the disease worldwide. Love Is The Cure is Elton's personal account of his life during the AIDS epidemic, including stories of his close friendships with Ryan White, Freddie Mercury, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, and others, and the story of the Elton John AIDS Foundation. With powerful conviction and emotional force, Elton conveys the personal toll AIDS has taken on his life - and his infinite determination to stop its spread. Elton writes, 'This is a disease that must be cured not by a miraculous vaccine, but by changing hearts and minds, and through a collective effort to break down social barriers and to build bridges of compassion. Why are we not doing more? This is a question I have thought deeply about, and wish to answer - and help to change - by writing this book.' The sale of Love Is the Cure will benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

The search for a "patient zero" popularly understood to be the first infected case 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 Gaetan 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.

In 2008 it was believed that HIV/AIDS was without doubt the worst epidemic to hit humankind since the Black Death. The first case was identified in 1981; by 2004 it was estimated that about 40 million people were living with the disease, and about 20 million had died. Yet the outlook today is a little brighter. Although HIV/ AIDS continues to be a pressing public health issue the epidemic has stabilised globally, and it has become evident it is not, nor will it be, a global issue. The worst affected regions are southern and eastern Africa. Elsewhere, HIV is found in specific, usually, marginalised populations, for example intravenous drug users in Russia. Although there still remains no cure for HIV, there have been unprecedented breakthroughs in understanding the disease and developing drugs. Access to treatment over the last ten years has turned AIDS into a chronic disease, although it is still a challenge to make antiviral treatment available to all that require it. We also have new evidence that treatment greatly reduces infectivity, and this has led to the movement of 'Treatment as Prevention'. In this Very Short Introduction Alan Whiteside provides an introduction to AIDS, tackling the science, the international and local politics, the demographics, and the devastating consequences of the disease. He looks at the problems a developing international 'AIDS fatigue' poses to funding for sufferers, but also shows how domestic resources are increasingly being mobilised, despite the stabilisation of international funding. Finally Whiteside considers how the need to understand and change our behaviour has caused us to reassess what it means to be human and how we should operate in the globalizing world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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.

In the Eye of the Storm tells the remarkable story of AIDS volunteers who engaged in a struggle for life against death. The people who volunteered to help during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s provided compassion and support to heavily stigmatised people. These volunteers provided in-home care for the sick and dying, staffed needle exchanges and telephone help-lines, produced educational resources, served on boards of management, and provided friendship and practical support, among many other roles. They helped people affected by the virus to navigate a medical system that in preceding decades had been openly hostile towards the marginalised communities of homosexuals, drug users and sex workers. In the process, volunteering left and indelible mark on the lives and outlooks of these volunteers. For the first time, by focusing on individual life stories, this book explores the crucial role of the men and women who volunteered at at time of disaster. Despite their critical role, they have not been sufficiently recognised. Through their stories, drawn from oral histories conducted by the authors, we see how those on the front-line navigated and survived a devastating epidemic, and the long-term impact of those grim years of illness, death and loss.

In the era of the Internet and "Oprah," in which formerly taboo information is readily available or freely confided, secrecy and privacy have in many ways given way to an onslaught of confession. Yet for those who are HIV positive, decisions about disclosure of their diagnosis force them to confront intimate, fundamental, and rarely discussed questions about truth, lies, sex, and trust.

Drawing from interviews with over seventy gay men and women, intravenous drug users, sex workers, bisexual men, and heterosexual men and women, the authors provide a detailed portrait of moral, social, and psychological decision making. The interviews convey the complex emotions of love, lust, longing, hope, despair, and fear that shape individual dilemmas about whether to disclose to, deceive, or trust others concerning this disease. Some of those interviewed revealed their diagnosis widely; others told no one. Some struggled and ultimately told their partners; others spoke in codes or half-truths. One woman discovered her husband's diagnosis in a diary; when confronted, he denied it.

Each year in the United States, 40,000 new cases of HIV arise, yet approximately one-third of the 900,000 Americans who are infected do not know it. As treatments have improved, unsafe sexual behavior has increased and efforts at prevention have stalled. Many of those infected continue to fear and experience rejection and discrimination. Addressing broad debates about the nature of secrecy, morality, and silence, this book explores public policy questions in the light of the nuanced, private decisions that are shaping the course of an epidemic and have broader indications for all.

Although adopting global norms often improves domestic systems of governance, domestic obstacles to norm diffusion are frequent. States that decide to reinvent their political authority simultaneously evaluate which current global norms are desirable and to what extent. In this study, Vlad Kravtsov argues that recent debates about the nature of authority in Putin's Russia and Mbeki's South Africa have resulted in a set of unique ideas on the cardinal goals of the state. This is the first book to explore how these consensual ideas have shaped health governance and impinged on norm diffusion processes. Detailed comparisons of HIV/AIDS governance systems in Russia and South Africa illustrate the argument. The Kremlin's dislike of international recommendations stemmed from the rapidly maturing statism and great power syndrome. Pretoria's responses to global AIDS norms were consistent with the ideas of the African Renaissance, which highlighted indigenousness, market-based empowerment, and moral leadership in global affairs. This book explains how and why the governments under investigation framed the nature of the epidemic, provided evidence-based prevention services, increased universal access to proven lifesaving medicines, and interacted with other participants in social practice.

This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times-from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism-helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists-from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald-Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men. Drawing on an extensive archive of newspapers, pornography, and film, as well as government documents, organizational records, and personal papers, Mumford sheds new light on four volatile decades in the protracted battle of black gay men for affirmation and empowerment in the face of pervasive racism and homophobia.

In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always "cooked" during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information-such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers-acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.

At a moment when ""freedom of religion"" rhetoric fuels public debate, it is easy to assume that sex and religion have faced each other in pitched battle throughout modern U.S. history. Yet, by tracking the nation's changing religious and sexual landscapes over the twentieth century, this book challenges that zero-sum account of sexuality locked in a struggle with religion. It shows that religion played a central role in the history of sexuality in the United States, shaping sexual politics, communities, and identities. At the same time, sexuality has left lipstick traces on American religious history. From polyamory to pornography, from birth control to the AIDS epidemic, this book follows religious faiths and practices across a range of sacred spaces: rabbinical seminaries, African American missions, Catholic schools, pagan communes, the YWCA, and much more. What emerges is the shared story of religion and sexuality and how both became wedded to American culture and politics. The volume, framed by a provocative introduction by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White and a compelling afterword by John D'Emilio, features essays by Rebecca T. Alpert and Jacob J. Staub, Rebecca L. Davis, Lynne Gerber, Andrea R. Jain, Kathy Kern, Rachel Kranson, James P. McCartin, Samira K. Mehta, Daniel Rivers, Whitney Strub, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, Judith Weisenfeld, and Neil J. Young.

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

When Daniel Baxter, the medical director of a large community health centre in New York City, accepted an invitation to work in Botswana, he hardly knew where to find the country on a map. Yet he set out nonetheless, naively confident that he would do good by bringing his first-world expertise to help in the roll-out of Africa's first HIV/AIDS treatment programme. But Baxter's good intentions were quickly overwhelmed by the reality of AIDS in Africa, his misguided altruism engulfed by the sea of need around him. Lifted up by Botswana's remarkable and forgiving people and by the country's majestic beauty, Baxter soldiered on. His memorable encounters with those living with HIV/AIDS - their unfathomable woes assuaged by their oft-repeated declaration ''But God is good!'' - profoundly changed the way he thought about himself and his role as a doctor. Eight years later, when Baxter finally left Africa to return to the United States, he realised he was not so much the giver as the recipient of a great human gift. Compelling, humorous, courageous and often heart-breaking, One Life at a Time documents the extraordinary experiences of a fallible but compassionate doctor working at the front line of HIV/AIDS care in Botswana.

This first-person account by one of the pioneers of HIV/AIDS research chronicles the interaction among the pediatric HIV/AIDS community, regulatory bodies, governments, and activists over more than three decades. After the discovery of AIDS in a handful of infants in 1981, the next fifteen years showed remarkable scientific progress in prevention and treatment, although blood banks, drug companies, and bureaucrats were often slow to act. 1996 was a watershed year when scientific and clinical HIV experts called for treating all HIV-infected individuals with potent triple combinations of antiretroviral drugs that had been proven effective. Aggressive implementation of prevention and treatment in the United States led to marked declines in the number of HIV-related deaths, fewer new infections and hospital visits, and fewer than one hundred infants born infected each year. Inexplicably, the World Health Organization recommended withholding treatment for the majority of HIV-infected individuals in poor countries, and clinical researchers embarked on studies to evaluate inferior treatment approaches even while the pandemic continued to claim the lives of millions of women and children. Why did it take an additional twenty years for international health organizations to recommend the treatment and prevention measures that had had such a profound impact on the pandemic in wealthy countries? The surprising answers are likely to be debated by medical historians and ethicists. At last, in 2015, came a universal call for treating all HIV-infected individuals with triple-combination antiretroviral drugs. But this can only be accomplished if the mistakes of the past are rectified. The book ends with recommendations on how the pediatric HIV/AIDS epidemic can finally be brought to an end.

What do HIV-positive women in Nigeria face as they seek meaningful lives with a deeply discrediting disease? Kathryn A. Rhine uncovers the skillful ways women defuse concerns about their wellbeing and the ability to maintain their households. Rhine shows how this ethic of concealment involves masking their diagnosis, unfaithful husbands, and unsupportive families while displaying their beauty, generosity, and vitality. As Rhine observes, collusion with counselors and support group leaders to deflect stigma, secure respectability, and find love features prominently in the lives of ordinary women who hope for a brighter future as the HIV epidemic continues to expand.

What do HIV-positive women in Nigeria face as they seek meaningful lives with a deeply discrediting disease? Kathryn A. Rhine uncovers the skillful ways women defuse concerns about their wellbeing and the ability to maintain their households. Rhine shows how this ethic of concealment involves masking their diagnosis, unfaithful husbands, and unsupportive families while displaying their beauty, generosity, and vitality. As Rhine observes, collusion with counselors and support group leaders to deflect stigma, secure respectability, and find love features prominently in the lives of ordinary women who hope for a brighter future as the HIV epidemic continues to expand.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.