Normality

‘Normalization’ is usually used as a pejorative within the academy; it’s often taken to mean a stifling of heterogeneity and multiplicity, a smoothing out of difference. This can only take place, so the line of thinking goes, through the exercise of power: perhaps overt, but more likely covert and insidious, through the dissemination and spread [...]

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Withdraw and Replace

An article in today’s New York Times about a massive drug recall by the Roche Pharmaceuticals of Switzerland, provides yet another sorry example of the perversities of the global HIV pharmaceutical sub-system. The drug, a protease inhibitor called Viracept, was quietly recalled because a possible contaminant in certain shipments of the drug. How many shipments [...]

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Magic

Tonight in class:
The Magic Johnson Foundation has partnered with Abbott Laboratories in a new HIV/AIDS-prevention and awareness campaign called I Stand With Magic. I didn’t know about it, but then again I find it difficult to keep up on every HIV/AIDS awareness campaign out there. This campaign is focused on ‘Black HIV/AIDS’; but as someone [...]

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AIDS and the Politics of Identity

From global warming to another worldwide crisis, AIDS.
I’m taking a course on HIV education. I’m enjoying the course because the instructor rightly eschews a purely ‘educative’ approach: one can’t become ‘educated’ or hope to educate others about HIV/AIDS, he argues, without understanding its specifically political and social characteristics. Point well taken, and one I [...]

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