We are happy to present a book forum organized around the release of Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay‘s Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Here, a “short” history should not be mistaken for one that is “thin” – Anderson and Mackay masterfully navigate a terrain populated as much by bodies as ideas. …
In recent years, the criminalization of HIV transmission, exposure and non-disclosure has become a hot topic among those working within the global AIDS milieu. Social scientists have become increasingly attentive to the complex and varied consequences and impacts of HIV criminalization. Not surprisingly, at this year’s Association of the Social Science and Humanities on HIV (ASSHH) Conference there was a …
On the 12th of June 2012 I attended a summit organised by The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care (IAPAC) and the British HIV Association (BHIVA). It focused on implementation challenges and opportunities of biomedical prevention, TasP and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and was titled “Controlling the HIV Epidemic with Antiretrovirals”. The conference facilitated discussion on the use of …
Sometime towards the end of May, this year, then-29 year-old Olympic athlete Lolo Jones revealed that she was still a virgin and she described this as the most difficult thing that she has ever done. Yes, she clarified, training for the Olympics was not nearly as difficult as remaining a virgin. A week following Lolo’s comments, a female guest on …
Serbia isn’t the first, or even the tenth, country that generally comes to mind when thinking about places deeply affected by HIV/AIDS. But in common with the rest of the Eastern European region it has a pressing HIV problem. With an emerging concentrated epidemic, a severely weakened health infrastructure and the ongoing political and economic ‘transition’ Serbia experiences significant challenges …
In 2011 South Africans witnessed a series of animated exchanges between Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and AIDS activists on the question of ‘sexual responsibility’ and the criminalization of HIV positive people who knowingly infect others[1]. Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) political opposition, argued that those who behave sexually irresponsibly do not deserve their free …