"Like an Asian Epidemic: Moving Between Bodies After HIV"
February 15, 2002
1:00-3:00 p.m.
Ruth McQuown Room, 219 Dauer Hall

Latest book:
Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of 'Curing' AIDS (U Minnesota Press, 1994).

Bibliographic links site

Paper synopsis:
This paper is a narrative experiment written in hopes of illuminating "Third World AIDS" less as geographically situated epidemics, than as dispersed and dispersing encounters across economies of mobile human bodies and geopolitical ideas. Building on fieldwork in Thailand in the late 1990s, this paper presupposes that the political forces that accompany the global AIDS epidemic acquire significance largely through a mobile mediascape that can bypass the ethnographic impulse in order to invest in discursive encounters, awaiting framing and materialization. Through this process, American science and political imaginary that clutter around the epidemic---including American-style progressive politics around HIV/AIDS---are themselves a traveling entity, dispersing various encounters with Third World bodies, yet never fully securing "freedom" or "cosmopolitanism" in foreign soil. While Third World AIDS rages on, such discursive encounters present an uneasy picture about power, nation, gender, sex, and disease than expected. This paper will conclude with a critical reflection of the implications of an "epidemic imaginary" (in place of the more general framework of "globalization") for postcolonial cultural studies.