Through the voices of people living with HIV or AIDS, this text explores the ways in which HIV affects personal, family and work relationships. It draws on the experinces of black and white, heterosexual and gay, women and men with or without symtoms who show how they work through everyday life.

With the startling blend of satiric wit, pathos, and heroism found in his acclaimed and iconoclastic novels, Feinberg--who died in 1994 at the age of 37--charts a harrowing journey down that "HIV highway to hell". "This is AIDS literature for a new generation--funny, impertinent, sexy, and enlightening".--The Advocate.

Janice and Bill were the perfect couple. They met during college, got married and began promising careers. But in 1987 their storybook life was shattered forever when they were diagnosed with HIV. Janice explains how they coped.

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.

An indispensable guide to every aspect of at-home care This thoroughly practical guide details the daily routines and unique concerns that are essential to quality at-home care of people with AIDS. From setting up a safe and comfortable environment to making medical and legal choices and solving emotional problems, each vital issue is covered in depth. Every caregiver and person with AIDS will benefit from this supportive, comprehensive resource.

• Detailed information on protecting against infection
• Concise instructions for both ambulatory and bedridden patients
• How to administer intravenous feedings and medication
• Appendices covering lab tests, alternative therapies, and the latest experimental drugs
• The differences between caring for men and women with AIDS
• Tips for caregivers on maintaining their own health and well-being

Community based organizations assist participants in developing social skills and familiar language for negotiating and practicing safer, non-risky behaviors. AIDS education and awareness is best achieved in local community groups through the use of interactive group sharing and non-professional language. Supportive and informed mutual aid can be extended through community based organizations and can alleviate the psychological effects of isolation, homophobia, abandonment, and political disinterest created by society at large. AIDS therapy and prevention is best accomplished in settings that encourage one-to-one communication and compassion. The seventeen authors of this masterful compilation of AIDS research and policy make a strong case for community organizations as valiant warriors in one of this century's most threatening epidemics against humanity.

"The authors provide important new information about the changing evolution of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the persons it is affecting, and its global impact. . . . Most important, it presents a compassionate and prophetic vision of what the church's response ought to be. . . ".--James B. Nelson, Professor of Christian Ethics, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, New Brighton, Minnesota.

From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV-mostly stigmatized minorities-began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punitive attitudes toward AIDS prompted lawmakers around the country to introduce legislation aimed at criminalizing the behaviors of people living with HIV. Punishing Disease explains how this happened-and its consequences. With the door to criminalizing sickness now open, what other ailments will follow? As lawmakers move to tack on additional diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis to existing law, the question is more than academic.

Almost four decades after the discovery of HIV/AIDS, the world continues to grapple with this public health challenge. Thinking Differently about HIV/AIDS explores the limits of mainstream approaches to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and challenges readers to develop alternate solutions, emphasizing the value of critical social science perspectives. The contributors investigate traditions of inquiry - governmentality studies, institutional ethnography, and Indigenous knowledges, among others - to determine what these perspectives can bring to HIV/AIDS research, policy, and programming. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how and why critical social science is necessary for rethinking research and action required to address the epidemic.

This provocative study examines the role of today's Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world - 80 per cent from intravenous drug use - and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. Jarrett Zigon takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, he explores broader anthropological questions - of morality, ethics, what constitutes a 'normal' life, and who defines it as such. Zigon argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

AIDS has been a devastating plague in much of sub-Saharan Africa, yet the long-term implications for gender and sexuality are just emerging. AIDS and Masculinity in the African City tackles this issue head on and examines how AIDS has altered the ways masculinity is lived in Uganda - a country known as Africa's great AIDS success story. Based on a decade of ethnographic research in an urban slum community in the capital Kampala, this book reveals the persistence of masculine privilege in the age of AIDS and the implications such privilege has for combating AIDS across the African continent.

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 Cote 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.

In 2013, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) will mark nearly ten years of success with an extraordinary year of achievements. None of this would have been possible without the vision and leadership of President Bush, President Obama, and the bipartisan support of Congress. A decade ago AIDS was wiping out an entire generation in Africa; today, PEPFAR's efforts and those of its many partners have brought the world to a new era -- a time when new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths are on the steep decline, and an AIDS-free generation is both U.S. policy and a goal within our reach. Building off recent breakthroughs, which demonstrated the power of key evidence-based interventions to drive down the rate of new infections and save more lives, this book reflects lessons learned from almost ten years of experience in supporting countries to rapidly scale-up HIV prevention, treatment, and care services. It demonstrates the opportunity for the world to help move more countries toward and beyond the tipping point in their epidemics and put them on a path to achieving an AIDS-free generation. The U.S. commitment to the global AIDS response will remain strong, comprehensive, and driven by science -- and clearly outlines what PEPFAR is doing and will continue to do to help make an AIDS-free generation a reality.

This deeply insightful ethnography explores the healing power of caring and intimacy in a small, closely bonded Apostolic congregation during Botswana's HIV/AIDS pandemic. "Death in a Church of Life" paints a vivid picture of how members of the Baitshepi Church make strenuous efforts to sustain loving relationships amid widespread illness and death. Over the course of long-term fieldwork, Frederick Klaits discovered Baitshepi's distinctly maternal ethos and the 'spiritual' kinship embodied in the church's nurturing fellowship practice. Klaits shows that for Baitshepi members, Christian faith is a form of moral passion that counters practices of divination and witchcraft with redemptive hymn singing, prayer, and the use of therapeutic substances. An online audio annex makes available the examples of the church members' preachings and songs.

How do modern women in developing countries experience sexuality and love? Drawing on a rich variety of interview, ethnographic and survey data from her native country of Kenya, Sanyu Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV infection compared to young African men, navigate their relationships, schooling, employment and financial access in the context of a devastating HIV epidemic and economic inequality. Writing from a unique outsider-insider perspective, Mojola argues that the entanglement of love, money, and the production and transformation of girls into "consuming women" lies at the heart of women's health and coming-of-age crises. Engaging in themes of gender, consumption, and the transition to adulthood, this text is an incisive analysis of gender, sexuality, and health in Africa.

AIDS & Representation explores portraits and self-portraits made in response to the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Addressing the work of artists including Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres through the interrelated themes of sickness and mortality, desire and sexual identity, love and loss, Fiona Johnstone shows how the self-representational practices of artists with HIV and AIDS offered a richly imaginative response to the limitations of early AIDS imagery. Johnstone argues that the AIDS epidemic changed the very nature of visual representation and artistic practice, necessitating a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human form. An extended epilogue considers the ongoing art historicization of the epidemic, re-contextualising the book's themes in relation to contemporary photographic works. More than just a historical discussion of the art of the AIDS crisis, AIDS and Representation contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the visual representation of illness. Expanding the established genre of the autopathography or illness narrative beyond the predominantly textual, this important contribution to art history and health humanities sensitively unpicks the entanglements between aesthetic form and the expression of lived experiences of critical and chronic ill health.

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.

""AIDS, Culture, and Gay Men" addresses the urgent need for research on HIV and the behaviors of men who have sex with men. Based on studies in the U.S., Australia, Greece, and Belgium, the authors provide ethnographic, epidemiological, biological, and historical data and cover issues of risk, ethics, language, and the nature of evidence, all directed at developing effective forms of intervention."--Shirley Lindenbaum, City University of New York "This book makes a compelling case that culturally oriented anthropological research is essential in understanding and responding to the AIDS crises among MSM and in gay communities."--Serena Nanda, City University of New York There are approximately seven million adult gay and bisexual men in the United States and 120 million adult gay and bisexual men globally. This highly readable volume of original essays explores the cultural dimensions of AIDS among men who have sex with men (MSM). The traditional emphasis in HIV/AIDS research within gay communities has focused on sexual behavior and psychological issues. Yet to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of the disease, and to halt the spread of HIV, it is essential to recognize and understand the culture of MSM. Cultural anthropologists, unquestionably, are in a unique position to achieve this understanding. Douglas Feldman has gathered a diverse group of experts to contribute to this collection, and the volume features a wealth of scholarly data unavailable elsewhere. Douglas A. Feldman is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Brockport. Awarded the AAA's Kimball Award in Public Anthropology in 1996 for his work exploring the connection between AIDS and anthropology, Feldman is the editor of five books, including "The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History" and "AIDS, Culture, and Africa."

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were once dismissed by Western experts as being too poor and chaotic to benefit from the antiretroviral drugs that transformed the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe. Today, however, the region is courted by some of the most prestigious research universities in the world as they search for resource-poor hospitals in which to base their international HIV research and global health programs. In Scrambling for Africa, Johanna Tayloe Crane reveals how, in the space of merely a decade, Africa went from being a continent largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central concern and knowledge production within the increasingly popular field of global health science.

Drawing on research conducted in the U.S. and Uganda during the mid-2000s, Crane provides a fascinating ethnographic account of the transnational flow of knowledge, politics, and research money as well as blood samples, viruses, and drugs. She takes readers to underfunded Ugandan HIV clinics as well as to laboratories and conference rooms in wealthy American cities like San Francisco and Seattle where American and Ugandan experts struggle to forge shared knowledge about the AIDS epidemic. The resulting uncomfortable mix of preventable suffering, humanitarian sentiment, and scientific ambition shows how global health research partnerships may paradoxically benefit from the very inequalities they aspire to redress. A work of outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, Scrambling for Africa will be of interest to audiences in anthropology, science and technology studies, African studies, and the medical humanities."

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.

Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Jennifer Brier provides rich, new understandings of the United States' complex social and political trends in the post-1960s era. Brier describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy, even in the face of the expansion of the New Right. Infectious Ideas places recent social, cultural, and political events in a new light, making an important contribution to our understanding of the United States at the end of the twentieth century. |Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Brier provides new understandings of the complex social and political trends of the post-1960s era. She describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy.

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.

When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. This book is a moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers, who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and 18 others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent - James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz - but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. ""Loss Within Loss"" spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects. This text is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. ""Loss Within Loss"" stands as a reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as a survey of that devastation.

A well-informed portrait, part social critique, part memoir, of sexual mores and homosexuality in provincial Mexico.

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.