Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780813563732)

There is an inherently powerful and complex paradox underlying HIV/AIDS prevention-between the focus on collective advocacy mobilized to combat global HIV/AIDS and the staggeringly disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS in many places. In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in South Florida. Although there is worldwide emphasis on the universality of HIV/AIDS as a social, political, economic, and biomedical problem, developments in HIV/AIDS prevention are rooted in and focused exclusively on disparities in HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality framed through the rubric of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Everyone is at equal risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, Sangaramoorthy notes, but the ways in which people experience and manage that risk-and the disease itself-is highly dependent on race, ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, immigration status, and other notions of "difference."

Sangaramoorthy documents in detail the work of AIDS prevention programs and their effect on the health and well-being of Haitians, a transnational community long plagued by the stigma of being stereotyped in public discourse as disease carriers. By tracing the ways in which public knowledge of AIDS prevention science circulates from sites of surveillance and regulation, to various clinics and hospitals, to the social worlds embraced by this immigrant community, she ultimately demonstrates the ways in which AIDS prevention programs help to reinforce categories of individual and collective difference, and how they continue to sustain the persistent and pernicious idea of race and ethnicity as risk factors for the disease.


Author: Thurka Sangaramoorthy
ISBN-10: 0813563739
ISBN-13: 9780813563732
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/26/2014
Pages: 192
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2014 pg. 486