Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. By Jennifer Brier. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 289 pp. $39.95)
In Infectious Ideas, Jennifer Brier effectively argues that the AIDS epidemic had a deep effect on the American political landscape. Viewing modern history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, she provides new understandings of the complex political and social trends of the 1980s era. She sets the tone for the book in her first paragraph when she states,
“Infectious Ideas argues that AIDS became political over the course of the 1980s, not only because more and more people were infected with what came to be known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the state failed to respond adequately …show more content…
Brier reviews the battle within the gay liberation movement to understand the impact of the disease. There were many conflicting ideas due to the unknown nature of the disease but many amazing groups were created such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) and the AIDS service organization (ASO). Brier provides an assessment of the various responses to the epidemic and describes how AIDS workers, in groups as different as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department, influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights during the sexual liberation movement, reproductive health, racial justice, feminism and health care policy in the face of the conservative movement. More activists pushed back against harsh AIDS legislation such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). AIDS provided an opportunity for these AIDS workers to “articulate an alternative communal and political vision” to the Reagan administration’s inaction as Reagan did not even mention the term “AIDS” until …show more content…
funded AIDS programs in the global South, one of which included the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation was the first U.S. based institution to implement a global AIDS program that not only dealt with the effects AIDS had on women but, more specifically, saw AIDS work as essential to its programs in reproductive health and justice. The Ford Foundation funded many locally based programs in countries including Thailand, Senegal and Brazil. AIDS work became a fundamental site for building a resistance to conservatism and the conservative policies of the 1980’s. The Ford Foundation saw its AIDS work as a “response to what it defined as the uneven policies of the conservative controlled federal government…Ford’s work demonstrated that consistent and practical attention to the impact of gender and economic inequality on AIDS circulated in the Global South at the same time that it did in the North.” Brier argues that the federal government’s AIDS policy produced the conditions that made it possible to confront conservatism and build an alternate to it. Infectious Ideas places recent cultural, social, and political events in a new light, making a significant contribution to our understanding of the AIDS epidemic and the United States at the end of the twentieth
In Infectious Ideas, Jennifer Brier effectively argues that the AIDS epidemic had a deep effect on the American political landscape. Viewing modern history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, she provides new understandings of the complex political and social trends of the 1980s era. She sets the tone for the book in her first paragraph when she states,
“Infectious Ideas argues that AIDS became political over the course of the 1980s, not only because more and more people were infected with what came to be known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the state failed to respond adequately …show more content…
Brier reviews the battle within the gay liberation movement to understand the impact of the disease. There were many conflicting ideas due to the unknown nature of the disease but many amazing groups were created such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) and the AIDS service organization (ASO). Brier provides an assessment of the various responses to the epidemic and describes how AIDS workers, in groups as different as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department, influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights during the sexual liberation movement, reproductive health, racial justice, feminism and health care policy in the face of the conservative movement. More activists pushed back against harsh AIDS legislation such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). AIDS provided an opportunity for these AIDS workers to “articulate an alternative communal and political vision” to the Reagan administration’s inaction as Reagan did not even mention the term “AIDS” until …show more content…
funded AIDS programs in the global South, one of which included the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation was the first U.S. based institution to implement a global AIDS program that not only dealt with the effects AIDS had on women but, more specifically, saw AIDS work as essential to its programs in reproductive health and justice. The Ford Foundation funded many locally based programs in countries including Thailand, Senegal and Brazil. AIDS work became a fundamental site for building a resistance to conservatism and the conservative policies of the 1980’s. The Ford Foundation saw its AIDS work as a “response to what it defined as the uneven policies of the conservative controlled federal government…Ford’s work demonstrated that consistent and practical attention to the impact of gender and economic inequality on AIDS circulated in the Global South at the same time that it did in the North.” Brier argues that the federal government’s AIDS policy produced the conditions that made it possible to confront conservatism and build an alternate to it. Infectious Ideas places recent cultural, social, and political events in a new light, making a significant contribution to our understanding of the AIDS epidemic and the United States at the end of the twentieth