My mother FaceTimed me a month ago and asked if I needed her to ship me hand sanitizer from Phoenix to Oregon. I thought it a silly question, but in hindsight, I should have known better than to doubt my mother. During our chat she informed me that a relative called earlier in the day to check in on her, …
I recently participated in a radio talk show on the topic of disaster capitalism and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Is the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? If it is, how does it compare to other disasters that anthropologists have written about? Might the lessons learned from other disasters, like the Hurricane Katrina recovery in New Orleans, be useful in understanding the current …
Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change
University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 236 pages.
Asthma is thought to affect an estimated 339 million people around the globe, with a prevalence rates as high as 20% of adults in some nations (Global Asthma Network 2018). It is one of the most common chronic conditions, impacting people across …
Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century
University of California Press, 2018. 320 pages.
The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution
NYU Press, 2018. 288 pages.
Trans young people are a matter of vital attention in the United States. Recently, trans-identified youth have figured in arguments about healthcare…
Introduction
HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have taken many forms, ranging from pop-up stalls at LGBTQ+ Pride parades to circuit parties at popular queer venues. In this essay, we examine music artist Frank Ocean’s recent attempt to revivify the HIV prevention-access circuit party: a dance event primarily attended by gay men which emerged in cities in the United States to fundraise for …
Encountering PrEP
I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer of 2014 and the global AIDS industry was humming with renewed biomedical triumphalism, hailing ‘the end of AIDS’ some argued PrEP and other scientific advances had made attainable (Kenworthy, Thomann, …