We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

by Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023081
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, and coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises and Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, all also published by Duke University Press.

Theodore Kerr is a writer, organizer, artist, and Lecturer of Interdisciplinary Arts at The New School as well as a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?

Table of Contents

Abbreviations  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
The Time of AIDS. Timeline 1  xiii
Introduction. We Are Starting This Conversation, Again  1
Section One. Trigger
Trigger 1. What We See  19
Trigger 2. Seeing Tape in Time   30
Trigger 3. Being Triggered Together  49
Trigger 4. Being Triggered in Times  59
Trigger 5. Being Triggered by Absence  73
Trigger 6. How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic  83
An AIDS Conversation Script to be Read Aloud. Timeline 2  95
Section Two. Silence
7. Silence + Object  101
8. Silence + Art  121
9. Silence + Video  139
10. Silence + Undetectability  159
11. Silence + Conversation  169
12. Silence + Interaction  183
13. Silence + Transformation  197
Conclusion. We Are Beginning This Conversation, Again  217
Sources and Influences. Timeline 3  227
Notes  251
Index  257

What People are Saying About This

After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images - Avram Finkelstein

“Researching the vast body of documentation devoted to HIV and AIDS leads to a network of colliding narratives. Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr help dismantle this web by reframing it as a series of triggers and silences and offering a strategic toolbox to help grapple with the persistent dilemmas of articulating individual agency, cultural memory, and political will in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.”

Bishnupriya Ghosh

“This book is an intensely moving, deeply experiential, and sharply analytic dialogue on the cultural production of AIDS. Centering their conversation around the ‘Bebashi video tape’ that documented African American women’s experiences in early 1980s Philadelphia, authors Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr attempt to trigger conversations on the nonlinear ‘times’ of the AIDS crisis and the timeliness of speaking/acting about it. As readers join the dialogic flow, they are folded into a luminous reanimation of lovingly preserved bibliographic and media archives that are collective resources for ongoing survival and the politics of care.”

Editorial Reviews

We Are Having This Conversation Now carves a terrain of multimedia and citations. . . . [Juhasz and Kerr’s] push to talk about AIDS across temporalities is an effort to drag conversations around AIDS and AIDS cultural production into a public present and keep them there."

The Baffler - Mackenzie Lukenbill

"We Are Having This Conversation Now is suffused with an awareness that the dominant narratives of AIDS in the United States have traditionally centered the lives of gay white men."

The Body - Alex Valenti

[Juhasz’s and Kerr’s] conversational model—by definition friendly, curious, and inviting, with an interest in accessibility and transparency—distinguishes [We Are Having This Conversation Now] from traditional academic writing and media criticism. Here, history-teaching and -learning is rooted in an oral history framework: that we learn what happened to communities from the people who constitute them.”

Bomb - Svetlana Kitto

"We Are Having This Conversation Now is suffused with an awareness that the dominant narratives of AIDS in the United States have traditionally centered the lives of gay white men."--Alex Valenti "The Body" (4/14/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"We Are Having This Conversation Now carves a terrain of multimedia and citations. . . . [Juhasz and Kerr's] push to talk about AIDS across temporalities is an effort to drag conversations around AIDS and AIDS cultural production into a public present and keep them there."

--Mackenzie Lukenbill "The Baffler" (12/15/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"[Juhasz's and Kerr's] conversational model--by definition friendly, curious, and inviting, with an interest in accessibility and transparency--distinguishes [We Are Having This Conversation Now] from traditional academic writing and media criticism. Here, history-teaching and -learning is rooted in an oral history framework: that we learn what happened to communities from the people who constitute them."

--Svetlana Kitto "Bomb" (12/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher