In this essay, I utilize the concept of the echo, as formulated in the historical and methodological work of Michel Foucault and Joan W. Scott, to help theorize the historical relationship between health feminism and AIDS activism. I trace the echoes between health feminism and AIDS activism in order to present a more complex history of both movements, and to try to think through the ways that the coming together of these two struggles in a particular place and time—New York (...) City in the 1980s—created particular practices that might be effective in other times and places. The practice that I focus on here is one that I call 'doing queer love '. As I hope to show, 'doing queer love ' both describes a particular history of health activism and opens up the possibility of bringing into being a different future than the one a conventional history of AIDS seems to predict. It is an historical echo that I believe we must try to hear now, not just in order to challenge a particular history of AIDS activism in the United States, but also in order to provide a model that can be useful for addressing the continuing problem of AIDS across the globe. (shrink)

This article explores illness as an assemblage of bodies, discourses, and practices by tracing a genealogy of the condition hystero-epilepsy in order to show the precarity of dominant bio-psychiatric ideology in the present. I read Siri Hustvedt’s case study of her own nervous condition with and against other histories of nerves, including Charcot’s treatment of hystero-epilepsy in the 1870s, Foucault’s treatment of hysteria, simulation, and the ‘neurological body’ presented in his lectures in 1974, and Elizabeth Wilson’s recent treatment of the (...) Freudian concept of ‘somatic compliance.’ I assemble this eclectic hystero-epileptic archive not in order to present a definitive history of hystero-epilepsy, but rather to think about how illness is made, unmade, and remade in the clinic and narrative. (shrink)

In this essay, I take up the question of the time of medicine in relation to two events in the U.S. from 2005—the Terri Schiavo case and Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. I consider both cases as “mediatized medical events,” that is, as events in which the practices of medicine received considerable media attention at a particular historical moment; or, we might say, as events that brought a convergence between media and medical practices. I juxtapose these two events because, placed (...) side by side, they help make visible two stories of catastrophe, as well as the many difficulties of telling stories of catastrophe. Bringing together these seemingly divergent events allows me to draw connections that I hope will expand our bioethical imaginary beyond the reductive approaches that tend to dominate the practice of bioethics today. I also juxtapose them to signal a bioethical tension at the heart of the neoliberal state’s response to catastrophe in general, what Foucault might have diagnosed as the difference between making live and letting die. In these two events, we glimpsed—if only fleetingly—the state’s operation of making live and letting die, and medicine’s central role in that operation, as well as the re-assertion of medical sovereignty in crisis events. (shrink)

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of 'feminism' and 'nationalism' through an exploration of the problem of time?

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of "feminism" and "nationalism" through an exploration of the problem of time?

In this paper, I offer a treatment of “the clinic” in which the clinic—as concept and space—is que(e)ried, that is, both questioned and made queer. I present two historical case studies that queer clinical thought and practices in the period before AIDS and before the full-blown arrival of queer theory on the western theoretical landscape. These two cases—the practice of self-help developed in the women’s health movement in the United States and the practice of tranversality developed out of and beyond (...) the Institutional Psychiatry movement in France—challenge the practice of medicine in the prehistory of both AIDS and queer theory, yet, they are not generally seen as precursors, or related in any way, to AIDS activism. In a sense, then, I also want to question and make queer the history of AIDS as we conventionally know it today by extending that history backwards and outwards to earlier queer critical and clinical practices like self-help and transversality. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze two memoirs—Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS—which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key (...) terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical “pragmatics” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

This essay discusses Susan Smiley’s documentary film, Out of the Shadow (2004), and Tina Kotulski’s memoir, Saving Millie: A Daughter’s Story of Surviving Her Mother’s Schizophrenia, as filmic and narrative treatments of their mother’s schizophrenia. Mildred Smiley, and her diagnosis of and treatment for schizophrenia, is at the center of both her daughters’ treatments of mental illness, and in these texts, all three become witnesses to the multiple experiences of mental illness and the multiple events of psychiatric power. As I (...) will argue, these two texts are treatments of schizophrenia that both see and don’t see Mildred Smiley’s experience of mental illness. Through these texts, we—viewer and reader—are asked to look again, or to look for the first time, at mental illness, and we are positioned as having the agency to look or look away. As we look and try to make sense of what we see (and don’t see), we too participate in the production of mental illness as a category of analysis. (shrink)