American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Global deliberations of HIV/AIDS today increasingly describe social inequalities as conditions of the AIDS pandemic. Agencies and advocates address global public health by arguing that disease transmission and its effects are enabled by power relations such as homophobia and sexism, racism and poverty, and the colonial histories that foster them. Saying that such conditions enable HIV’s disproportionate spread surpasses tales from the disease’s first decade of risk groups, which Cindy Patton has read as a “tropical” logic that locates danger in the perverse embodiment of marginal sexual, racial, or national groups. Current claims also modify how some activists countered risk-group tales by addressing practice in arguments that risk arises not from who you are, but what you do. If such a shift invited harm-reduction approaches to HIV, it also could avoid considering how one’s choices are shaped by one’s locations in power relations, which can create illusions of choice. Early AIDS activists argued the pandemic’s power-laden social construction by critiquing public health institutions for complicity in the spread of AIDS or by mobilizing people affected by AIDS to alter conditions in their lives. A key mode activists used to address social marginality was the production of new media. AIDS activists recorded experiences, shared health information, and articulated agendas for change in creative texts, visual art, video, and performance that marked and challenged the power relations that marginalized people affected by AIDS. Thus, when Paul Farmer famously argued that “critical perspectives on emerging infections must ask how large-scale social forces come to have their effects on unequally positioned individuals,” he echoed theory already proposed by AIDS activists and their media.