Abstract
The story of HIV infection & the experience of AIDS is not, nor has it ever been, a story about an isolated biomedical condition. The virus’s transmission from one place to the entire globe within ten short years demonstrates our interconnectivity as people and nations. But the impacts of the epidemic also show the interconnectivity of human cultural systems and ideological structures. The story of HIV & AIDS is a story about politics, economics, and transnational relations as well as health/medicine, and any adequate understanding of this pandemic must be placed in historical context.
The history of AIDS is, in many respects, a story of criminal neglect and stupidity, as well as of astonishing courage and resourcefulness on the part of individuals and their affected communities.2
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Notes
Quoted in Martin E. Marty, “Tradition and the Traditions in Health/Medicine and Religion” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 5. Emphasis removed from the original.
Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), xviii.
Gerald M. Oppenheimer, “In the Eye of the Storm” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 270.
Paula A. Treichler, “AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 200.
Cindy Patton, Last Served? Gendering the HIV Pandemic (London: Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 1994), 9.
Dennis Altman, “Legitimation Through Disaster: AIDS and the Gay Movement” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 302.
Cindy Patton, Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi.
Charles E. Rosenberg, “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 13.
Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside, AIDS in the Twenty-First Century: Disease and Globalization, 2nd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 65.
Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 128.
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© 2012 Cassie J. E. H. Trentaz
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Trentaz, C.R.E.H. (2012). The Language of “Risk”: Setting the Story. In: Theology in the Age of Global AIDS & HIV. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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