Viral Transmission: Affect, Disidentification and the Curation of AIDS Activist Archives on Tumblr

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: Activism & Sex Robots

Abstract

Digital media creates new economies where archival records documenting AIDS activism in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s frequently circulate and are appropriated in ways divorced from the gendered, racialized, political, and affective context of their production. These images are frequently disseminated on social media in ways that shape and are shaped by platforms' affordances as well as political and cultural values. This paper follows a set of 1988 images, including a photograph of ACT UP dying-in at the Food and Drug Administration, agitprop collective Gran Fury's "Read My Lips," and a letter by artist Félix González-Torres' to lover Ross Laycock, as they emerge from archives into and within Tumblr. On Tumblr, a social media and microblogging platform, users become curators. The frequent blogging, reblogging, and liking of AIDS images without any contextualizing reference has been framed as depoliticizing young queer users, who embrace the aesthetics of the past rather than the politics of AIDS' present. However, following curatorial acts on Tumblr presents a more complicated understanding. Tumblr is an important site of creative production and fandom for its users, largely youthful and often identified with LGBTQ and/or communities of color. Tumblr's design affords the formation of counterpublic spaces for media literacy, identity formation, and political awareness. Its users' appropriation and accumulation of iconic AIDS images I argue is marked by disidentification, where bloggers are situating themselves both within and against dominant white, gay male discourses through which queer people called to identify with AIDS and its activism.

Author

• Marika Cifor, Indiana University - Bloomington