Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m8s7h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T16:45:02.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Women Don't Get AIDS, They Just Die From It”: Memory, Classification, and the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexis Shotwell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, I examine activist group ACT UP's campaign to change the US Centers for Disease Control surveillance case definition of HIV and AIDS. This campaign's effects included a profound shift in how AIDS is understood, and thus in some real way in what it is. I argue that classification should be understood as a political formation with material effects, attending to the words of activists, most of them women, who contested the way AIDS was defined in a moment when no one else thought that definition needed to be changed. I argue that philosopher Sue Campbell's work on the importance of understanding memory and feeling as relational helps understand the histories of death and loss, resistance and fierce joy, crystallized in activist responses to HIV and AIDS.

Type
Cluster: In Relation: Exploring the Work of Sue Campbell
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 509 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banzhaf, Marion. 2007. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #070, April 18. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Bordowitz, Gregg. 2002. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #004, December 17. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Bowker, Geoffrey, and Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, Sue. 1997. Interpreting the personal: Expression and the formation of feelings. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, Sue. 2003. Relational remembering: Rethinking the memory wars. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Campbell, Sue. 2008. Remembering for the future: Memory as a lens on the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Carlomusto, Jean. 2002. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #005, December 19. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Castiglia, Christopher, and Reed, Christopher. 2011. If memory serves: Gay men, AIDS, and the promise of the queer past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Centers for Disease Control (CDC). 2007. AIDS surveillance in the United States. May 18. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/software/apids/manual/section1.htm (accessed December 2, 2011).Google Scholar
Centers for Disease Control (CDC). 2013. NNDSS case definitions overview. http://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/script/casedefDefault.aspx (accessed May 31, 2013).Google Scholar
Cohen, C. J. 1999. The boundaries of blackness: AIDS and the breakdown of black politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cvetkovich, A. 2003. An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diedrich, L. 2007. Doing queer love: Feminism, AIDS, and history. Theoria 54 (112): 25–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorow, Heidi. 2007. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #069, April 17. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, S. 1998. Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gould, D. B. 2009. Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP's fight against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaggar, Alison. 1996. Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. In Women, knowledge, and reality: Explorations in feminist philosophy, second ed., ed. Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McGovern, Terry. 2007. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #076, May 25. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Ramspacher, Karen. 2008. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #094, July 13. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Schulman, Sarah. 2003 Statements. May 12. http://www.actuporalhistory.org/about/statements.html (accessed December 2, 2012).Google Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth. 1989. Anger and insubordination. In Women, knowledge, and reality: Explorations in feminist philosophy, first ed., ed. Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Treichler, Paula A. 1999. How to have theory in an epidemic: Cultural chronicles of AIDS. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vazquez‐Pacheco, Robert. 2002. Interview by Sarah Schulman. Interview #002, December 14. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Maxine. 2004. Interview by Jim Hubbard. Interview #043, February 19. Transcript. New York: ACT UP Oral History Project.Google Scholar