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

by Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

Published November 11, 2022

Reviews

[Kevin Langson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant way to engage with the cultural significance of HIV. For someone new to HIV studies, the conceptual timeline and the foregrounding of the epidemic's (ongoing) impact on women and marginalized communities is very helpful and meaningful. Plus the personalities and particular interests of the two authors, from different generations and with different but complementary perspectives on HIV, add resonance to the text.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up a few years ago at MOMA - to be honest I thought this would be more anthropological but found it quite engaging and learned a lot, enjoyed the formatting integrating personal history with media studies