"You Can't Call It a Party": Black Women's Healthy Love Knowledge and CDC's Science

• In Event: Black Feminist Health Science Studies: Exploring New Possibilities

Abstract

This paper critical analyses black womanists’ epistemologies in their negotiation with more hegemonic—and U.S. Public Health approved—ways of knowing and producing knowledge. In the late 2000s, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided opportunity for black American HIV/AIDS community-based organizations (CBOs) to prove their “home-grown” prevention programs effective. Prevention programs that black American HIV/AIDS activists refer to as F.U.B.U. (For Us, By Us) would now have a chance to be demonstrated effective and thereby gain CDC's stamp of approval and become a scientifically “demonstrated effective behavioral intervention” (a D.E.B.I.). This is, perhaps, an unprecedented moment; black American's subjectivity and activism takes center stage within the HIV/AIDS prevention field and disease discourse.

Yet, what happens when a black American feminist reproductive and HIV/AIDS justice CBO attempts to prove their sex-positive black women only “Healthy Love Party” is “truly” effective in preventing the continued spread of HIV infection? Relying on data I collected through participant-observation and interviews with black women (including the founder and president) of the CBO, and content and discursive analysis of public health and social movement documents, I highlight how the black feminist HIV/AIDS activists creatively negotiated to successful scientifically prove their “intravention” effective. However, I also show how the black feminist CBO’s interaction with CDC, ultimately undermines the radical social justice orientations and practices of their CBO. Still, I invite us all to ponder the revolutionary possibilities of black feminist women epistemologies truly taking center stage in the fight to address black people’s health.

Author

• Kevin M. Moseby, Drexel University