Science and Silence: AIDS, Black Feminisms, and the Resounding Queer Radical Imagination

• In Event: Radical Imaginations and the Recursion of 1970s-1990s Feminist and Queer of Color Literary and Visual Cultures in the Present

Abstract

This paper traces how Black feminist and queer activisms helped to transform the AIDS movement’s early clarion call for "drugs into bodies" during the 1980s into "healthcare not warfare" by the early 1990s. I analyze the documentary film Voices from the Front (1992) by the Testing the Limits Collective and pay attention to how it centralizes Black feminist and queer critiques of the medical-military industrial complex in order to conjure what I call a “queer radical imagination.” Notably, video footage that appears and is heard in Voices continues to be adapted into contemporary documentary films about historical AIDS activism, including United in Anger (2011) and How to Survive a Plague (2012). By focusing on Voices and the articulations of Black women, and other women of color, of their struggles with and actions against mainstream media stigmatization and erasure, Voices continues to teach us important strategies for coalition building and collective survival to challenge the criminalization of dissent, dismantling of healthcare, violent policing of social and geographical borders, and U.S. led global military occupations.

Applying the theories of Angela Y. Davis, Fred Moten, and Evelynn Hammonds, among others, I specifically trace the film’s Black feminist and queer sonic interventions into science and media since at least the late-nineteenth-century advent of audiovisual recording devices, like phonography and talkies. These sonic afterlives continually resound in today’s popular media to make visceral the colonial and racial connections between the microbiological and everyday violence practiced against U.S. Black women and the global south, as well as resistances to their silencing effects. In turn, I argue that the film portrays HIV/AIDS as not simply individual and biological, but rather structured by histories of anti-Blackness and militarism that require that we hear, and build upon, the "queer radical imagination" in order to mobilize collective action.

Author

• Jih-Fei Cheng, Scripps College