The Medical Humanities and Health Studies forum proposes a panel on the convergences and divergences between AIDS and COVID-19, and the implications of this relationship on the medical and health humanities. The panel proposes to explore the fundamental axiom of the medical humanities that health disparities subtending pandemics are not simply epidemiological but also socially, politically, and narratively produced. In this light, the panel proposes to understand how AIDS might constitute a barometer in thinking about rhetorical logics subtending COVID-19. Instead of theorizing through generational models of succession (that assume the pastness of AIDS), the panel proposes to inquire into the long durée of overlapping and ongoing pandemics. Even while AIDS and COVID-19 become the central markers for our discussions, the presentations pose the question of what it might mean to refuse the idea of pandemics as having singular points of origin and finite conclusions.

The panel thus proposes to think about both AIDS and COVID-19 as relational and overlapping rather than as exceptional crisis moments. The rhetoric of turning points can be useful in foregrounding the urgency of action and the necessity of solidarity. But crisis narratives can also perform reductive work: they frame these modes of urgency as states of exception rather than modes of slow death or “crisis ordinariness,” to use Lauren Berlant’s term. We are interested in what precedes the putative first occurence of pandemics and what lingers in supposed aftermaths "when we return to normal."

Sheila Giffen’s presentation analyzes “turning points” in both AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics (the advent of protease inhibitors in 1996 and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in affluent nations). Giffen’s discussion suggests how the yearning for a return to ‘normal’ in the aftermath of biomedical “solutions” is a desire to once again ‘normalize’ the global systems of health inequality. Her presentation proposes a return to a transnational and multi-racial archive of literature to reckon with how pandemics mark a crisis of biopolitical subjection shaped by forces of globalization and coloniality. If Giffen offers a critique of biomedical “solutions,” Jih-Cheng critiques epistemologies of the safety as idealized prophylactics. Cheng thus asks: what if the goal isn’t to one day remove masks “safely” when things “go back to normal” but to reconsider our models for care in medicine specifically and education generally—in other words, to expand our knowledge about masks into an all-encompassing safety net?

The call to shift away from the liberal and biological individual and instead to recognize the failures of the state institutions of knowledge continue in Amanda Caleb’s presentation on how public health campaigns informing both AIDS and COVID-19 were realized through racist rhetorics that framed Black bodies as being irresponsible and reckless. Caleb thus demonstrates the dangers of public health rhetoric that targets individuals with implied personal blame and failure to address the structural inequalities that have created such health inequalities. While Caleb focuses on pathologization of Black bodies, Margaret Rhee grapples with the emergences of violent anti-Asian racism in light of the Covid-19 pandemic as signaled in narratives subtending “the Chinese virus.” Returning to AIDS as a placeholder to examine the genealogy of racializing illness, Rhee analyzes how the Asian body has historically been configured as existing within the “cesspool of contagion” of Chinatowns. She thus asks: how is it that Asian Americans can be seen as viruses, and not living with a virus? How do pandemics shape or amplify Asian racialization?

If the relational framing of AIDS and COVID-19 highlights histories of racial and economic health disparities, the panel also discusses how a medical humanities lens might offer pedagogies of care and transformation. Sofia Varino thus asks: what might the viral allow the medical humanities to think and do? Her discussion focuses on the clinical and social transformations that both AIDS and COVID-19 have enabled through their impact on social bonds and relations, including affect and embodied experiences. Similarly, Travis Alexander’s discussion returns to the so called “second half” of AIDS, beginning with the antiretroviral era of the late-1990s and the emergence of barebacking and bug chasing subcultures. These communities didn’t just eroticize seroconversion but sourced a communitarian solidarity from it. He thus contends that this return might offer pedagogical value in contravening an immunitary biopolitics in public health drag in current and future epidemiological crises.

These conversations will begin with presenters offering their initial thoughts through informal "lightening" presentations for 6-7 minutes, followed by 10 minutes in which panelists will make connections between their discussions. The remaining 20 minutes will allow for informal discussion with attendants.