This essay pursues how HIV/AIDS and digital media transform one another’s historiographies. Working with the archive of activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943–2000), the essay considers the role of AIDS organizing in the history of the Internet, and in establishing recursive relations between media formats. Kuromiya’s early adoption of Internet technology centered the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS, incarcerated people, and people of color to access vital information for community formation and survival. Tracing the unlikely collaboration between Kuromiya and techno-futurist architect R. Buckminster Fuller (1885–1983), which culminated in Kuromiya’s founding of the Critical Path AIDS Project, this essay interrogates the term “adjuvant,” which Fuller borrowed from immunological discourse to describe their co-authorship. Anchored in a critical engagement with the metaphor of the adjuvant — an agent aiding immunological response — this essay elaborates the digital infrastructures underwriting a blueprint for community building, offering a prehistory of digital queer care networks. In conclusion, the essay meditates on the role of curation in theorizing the temporality of AIDS and its ongoing histories.
Crochet Coral Reef (2005 -) is a woolly exoskeleton of coralline geometries and sea critters made by a collective of hands joining animal and plastic fibers in hyperbolic shapes. The reef is a "testimony to the disappearing wonder of living reefs" and a creative experiment of the twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, a science writer and an art professor, respectively, and the Los Angeles nonprofit Institute for Figuring; like the marine organism, the crochet reef is fertile and spawns its fiber tentacles to stage public art interventions about warming sea temperatures, carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, plastic trash, and the pacific trash vortex. 1 As a collective and aesthetic rendering of threat and survival, Crochet Coral Reef is suggestive of how we negotiate environmental risk in myriad forms of collusion, protest, and cohabitation. "We" is an idea and a problem, a shape to ask after. I am particularly interested in the convergence between this project's engagement with touch, risk/survival, and handicraft, on the one hand, and those issues in transgender theory and experience, on the other: that is, I see promising overlaps between a fiber art project and the everyday process of becoming that transgender life necessitates. In what follows I practice, as a method, intra action, a process that Karen Barad describes as "the mutual constitution of entangled agencies," to think between coral erosion and transgender. 2 Valuing a diversity of fragile ecological bodies -human, animal, fiber, and aquatic -this essay examines how patterns of harm contour vulnerable populations and the administration of life in biosocial scenes of not only climate and biosphere but also sex and gender. It does so by foregrounding feelings and fractals -or patterns and repeats -to assemble a lexicon of transgender in coral, crochet coral,
Is sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.
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