Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay
cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years,
the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in
innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth
century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars
across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS
activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors
who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.” And yet
not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s
and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of
empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to
mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this
activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced
unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their
condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative
clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing
unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that
challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of
their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich
Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the
riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible
embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their
disease. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS
activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of
which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical
lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health
and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health
activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health
activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major
pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of
resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the
twenty-first century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a
deeply researched portrait of distrust and
disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain
the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s
authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation,
while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the
meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.
General
Imprint: |
Rutgers University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Critical Issues in Health and Medicine |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
Firstpublished: |
2024 |
Authors: |
Matthew Kelly
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
274 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-978835-07-8 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-978835-07-8 |
Barcode: |
9781978835078 |
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