Screening Treatment Activism: The Precarious Temporo-Politics of Illness

• In Event: Cinema and Precarity: Treatment, Risk, Trauma

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the campaign “Drugs into Bodies” as expressing an ontology of the late capitalist present, a condensation of the interaction of medicine, politics, and the conflicting demands of different temporalities: the emergency time of immediate action and the precarious time of reaching for new forms to articulate what is and is not yet coming into being. I discuss two recent examples—How to Survive a Plague and Dallas Buyers Club—of screening treatment activism, in order to suggest the ways treatment activism is depicted on screen, and else these representations screen from our view.

Presenter

• Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook University