The Global History of HIV/AIDS

3 units

Most (if not all) of us have never known a world without HIV/AIDS. The potential risk of seroconversion has been integrated into sexual health education and popular media for more than three decades. At the same time, HIV has often been portrayed as either an issue of a minority (e.g., gay men, intravenous drug users, sex workers) or as existing over there in the Global South, overlooking the major crisis within the United States. This course tackles the history of HIV/AIDS as a global history of gender and sexuality between the Global North and the Global South. Throughout the course, we will consider major ethical questions regarding disease and control. Who gets to be a victim, and who is labeled a culprit? What actions should be pursued in the midst of an epidemic? Who controls the narrative about disease? We will look at international biopolitical practices by tracing the downward flow of researchers and specialists from the Global North to the Global South and the upward flow of scientific knowledge and capital. In this way, we will see how the Global South has played a crucial role in the perceptions, treatment, and profiting of HIV/AIDS in the United States and the Global North through the recent breakthrough in pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), sold on the market as Truvada/Descovy. The course has three thematic sections: Discovery and Reaction, Politics and Activism, and Research and Health.