Publisher Description

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.

Author Biography

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

Review

"[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 *
"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 *
"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 *

Review Quote

"[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."

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