Vectors of hope and possibility: Commentary on reckless vectors

Abstract

Reckless Vectors is an important contribution to our understanding of the social, cultural, legal, and political dimensions of AIDS. It addresses what has become a largely neglected aspect of AIDS research, the continuing stigmatization and criminalization of people living with AIDS/HIV (PLWA/HIVs). Such stigmatization and criminalization were central themes in AIDS organizing and scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s but subsequently suffered from a “peculiar eclipsing” (Smith, 1987a). The increasing management of AIDS groups through state funding, professionalization, and strategies of consultation and partnership (Kinsman, 1997) as well as a downturn in most forms of AIDS-related social and political activism further contributed to the diminished focus and emphasis on these questions. At the same time, many AIDS groups have been forced into participating in, or have become complicit in, the process of social stigmatization described in the contributions in this collection. Reckless Vectors places these under-documented and under-theorized questions back on the agenda as central questions for AIDS research, scholarship, and activism. In doing so, it troubles and undermines aspects of the new common sense constructed around AIDS, which is to some extent based on a normalization and naturalization of AIDS that takes for granted that treatments are now available that can extend people’s lives (despite all the complications and side effects that have arisen) and assumes once again that some PLWA/HIVs are the problem in HIV transmission. Instead Reckless Vectors opens up space for more socially and culturally critical perspectives. In part it does this by reconnecting us as readers with some of the more forgotten insights, perspectives, and memories of earlier AIDS activism and organizing. The papers, especially those by Mary Petty (2005), Cindy Patton (2005), and Worth, Patton, and Goldstein (2005), help us to remember and to keep alive what we learned from earlier AIDS activism and thereby allow us to have a clearer idea of how our historical present has emerged. These contributions work against the social organization of forgetting (Kinsman, 2004)—a process that I believe is key to maintaining ruling capitalist, professional, and bureaucratic relations (Smith, 1999)—and encourage instead an active social and historical remembering of earlier struggles and what they taught us. I further believe that these papers taken together present us with a number of vectors of hope and possibility that can assist in revitalizing AIDS activism and scholarship. While this special issue does not cover every aspect of the current social organization of the AIDS crisis—for example, it does not address current treatment issues and politics or the AIDS-related devastation in sub-Saharan Africa—the papers in it do complement and build on each other to establish an important beginning for further discussions and explorations.