Suchergebnisse

In Globalizing AIDS, pioneering cultural critic Cindy Patton looks at the complex interaction between modern science, media coverage, and local activism during the first decade of the epidemic. Patton's critique of both the production of scientific credibility and the implementation of public health policy at the local level offers a bold reevaluation of how we think about AIDS and an innovative approach to the reality of the disease

The author revisits the work of a research team on which she served in the early 1990s to show why researchers have difficulty recognizing that social identities are not only heterologo U.S. (referring to different objects), but also heteromorphic (formed in different ways). While activists have eventually convinced researchers that sexuality has many different contexts and meanings, most health educators apply this insight by simply increasing the number of contents possible in an identity still thought in ego-psychology terms, that is, as the integration of self-esteem, values, and a realistic assessment of behavior. The team on which the author served recognized "identity" as a combination of identification with and disidentification from various possible labels, and viewed identity as conflicted and as discursively inter-relating the "self" and institutional structures. Nevertheless, this insight could not get analytic purchase in the context of a large, positivistic contract research team. The author identifies three cases in which the dominant research conceptualizations of identity and behavior misread the situations the team was uncovering.

Spectatorship theory has been much used and much critiqued as a means of understanding the gendering of "the look" and its object. The article revitalizes spectatorship theory to understand the way in which gender and looking create an ethical problem in the practice of judging—in this case, judging bodybuilding during the sport's crisis over the proper female body in the early 1990s. The article also explores some of the controversies about sport as spectacle that occurred in the rough time frame of bodybuilding's spectatorial crisis.

Throughout the 1980s, the American right wing attempted to control the field of social politics and social policy through a rhetoric of `family'. In response, the left, including much of the lesbian and gay movement, abandoned an early, theorized antipathy to family, attempting to recapture the political field with ideas like `alternative families' and `families we chose'. These moves do not sufficiently account for the hidden glue that binds bodies to politics, national or anti-national. The glue, or, as Benedict Anderson calls it, `political love' is no longer an affect to be rejected but a `feeling' to be embraced. Examining the case of sexual abstinence in early right-wing AIDS discourse and in current websites, this article suggests that micro-politics of love are inextricable from macro-politics of nationalism.