The Specter of AIDS

Abstract

The Specter of AIDS is a transdisciplinary text originally written in 1980s Brasil in a time of pandemic emergency. It situates how HIV/AIDS reconfigured intimacy, sexuality, and power while also providing a minoritarian theory of desire lived by dissident sexualities in 1980s Latin America. Perlongher’s paper exposes a new barometer of life undergirded by medico-scientific reason, religious ideology, and morality — in other words, a re-actualization and intensification of normative reason. In nuanced prose combined with wit, rigorous scholarship, political alertness, and poetics, Perlongher delineates how HIV/AIDS serves as a blueprint for how viral threats shed light on the inequitable unevenness of this world. Written in Portuguese in 1987 and then published in Spanish in 1988, this translation offers an un/timely reading for the 21st century as it shows how new contaminants threaten national public health’s paradigms of gendered and racialized structures: their borders, bodies, and good comportment.