We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, and coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises and Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, all also published by Duke University Press.

Theodore Kerr is a writer, organizer, artist, and Lecturer of Interdisciplinary Arts at The New School as well as a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?