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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1990)
Ruminations on the AIDS crisis Both anthologies combine highly theoretical articles with more direct and personal reflections by PWAs and AIDS activists BY ED S C H I F F E R Andrea Dworkin. Simon Watney’s ‘The Spectacle of AIDS” covers similar ground as AIDS: Cultural AnaJysis/Cultural Activism. it situates the presentation of the male Edited by Douglas Crimp. MTT Press, 1988. homosexual body ravaged by AIDS in a larger $10.95. campaign to promote “family values.” Watney, a film critic who is also an Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics. administrator for Britain’s oldest AIDS Edited by Simon Watney. Serpent's Tail, 1989. service organization, has emerged as a $13.95. preeminent voice in the cultural analysis of the epidemic. His groundbreaking book. s the last international AIDS conference Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the made clear, the epidemic is more than a Media (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), medical event. Sadly, it has become the was among the first to show how the societal occasion for much speculation about late 20th response to AIDS was part of a larger century society. Two recent and somewhat conservative assault on freedom, sexual and overlapping anthologies suggest that the otherwise. With compelling, eloquent rage, greatest health crisis in recent history exposes Watney continues this line of analysis in the much in our culture that was already far from introductory essay to Taking Liberties: AIDS healthy. and Cultural Politics. Edited by Watney and Erica Carter, this collection grew out of a conference at England’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and it complements the October volume offering a primarily British perspective. Carter explains how British artists, tired of an apolitical In his introduction to AIDS: Cultural postmodernism, have rallied around the issue Analysis!Cultural Activism, editor Douglas of AIDS, and Keith Alcorn offers a Crimp confronts the long prevalent comprehensive critique of the BBC’s self- assumption that the scientific explanation and congratulatory “AIDS Television Week.” management of AIDS can be taken for Some might suggest that the cultural critics granted and that therefore “cultural producers themselves are a tad too self-congratulatory, can respond to the epidemic in only two ways: but it is to the editors’ credit that many of the essays in Taking Liberties seem to be in by raising money for scientific research and dialogue with one another. Cindy Patton’s service organizations or by creating works scathing indictment of a newly constituted that express the human suffering and loss.“ “AIDS Industry” in which women and gay The volume that follows (which began as men assume their traditional roles as an issue of the art journal October) is not a caregivers while straight men cast themselves collection of artists’ personal musings, but a as “experts” is answered by Jan Zita Grover’s tough-minded series of reflections on the warnings against a dangerous “nostalgia” for AIDS crisis. Jan Zita Grover’s “AIDS: the early days of the crisis. Keywords” offers a glossary of terms (such as An equally impressive accomplishment of “victim”) that prove to be symptomatic of both the English and American anthologies is rampant misunderstanding. Paula A. that both combine highly theoretical articles Treichler, an historian of medicine, shows in with more direct and personal reflections by her essay on “biomedical discourse” that there PWAs and AIDS activists. Occasionally the has been an “epidemic of signification” in the two perspectives merge, as in Meurig scientific literature on AIDS that researchers Horton’s “Bugs, Drugs and Placebos” (in have sought to contain by clinging to a single Taking Liberties), which details the virus hypothesis that might not be warranted. contradictions in the assumptions behind drug And Sander L. Gilman approaches medical trials in the context of his own search for history from a different angle to show how treatment. Indeed, the most profound much the iconography of AIDS recalls 19th intellectual consequence of AIDS may lie in a century depictions of syphilis. rethinking of the relationship of social theory The collection’s most trenchant essays, to social practice. As difficult and jargon however, go well beyond the “facts” of the laden as some of the essays in these epidemic. Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a anthologies may be, they manage to convince Grave?” is a far-ranging meditation on sexual us that it is a matter of life and death how we politics that relates modem discomfort with choose to theorize about the AIDS crisis and male homosexuality to the speculations of its continuing causes. V feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Phoenix R ising P resents A Treat yourself to a MASSAGE BY STEVEN KOEHLER, LMT for the New Year! O U T S I D E IN Make massage a regular part o f the ’90s for you. Discounts available. 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