This article investigates the creation of an online photo database at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). The status of images of sexuality in this collection presents opportunities for reflecting on the cultural politics of digitization in community archives, including the accessibility of sexual materials in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) archives as they move online. I argue that the design of this project has generated moments of reckoning with various political contexts in which the archives moves. The LHA's approach to digitization is improvisational, open to revision and critique, and willfully imperfect in its management of considerations such as metadata. Digitization presents the archives with the opportunity to consider the ways that the historical representations of sexuality it houses challenge the normative imperatives that can accompany digital media practices, including the ways that all kinds of sex practices and gendered ways of being scramble the categorical logics of structured databases.
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This article puts forward an argument for the importance of HIV/AIDS to digital studies, focusing, focusing on the North American context. Tracing conjoined histories and presents makes clear that an HIV-informed approach to digital media studies offers methods for attuning to marginalized media practices that should be central to interrogating the politics, relations, and aesthetics of digital media. Artist Kia LaBeija’s #Undetectable (2016) is closely analyzed in order to explicate some of HIV’s potential resonances for digital studies, including viral media and justice-based responses to surveillance. We then propose a methodological framework for centering HIV in understandings of three key concepts for the field: (1) networks; (2) social media and platforms; and, (3) digital history. We argue that HIV-positive users bring expertise to navigating digital infrastructures that can surveil and harm while also facilitating pleasure and connection. Such tension provides models of response that publics need to insist upon more just digital tools and structures for our unfolding present.
The first issue of The Critical Path AIDS Project Newsletter, launched in 1989, ends with a small SILENCE = DEATH graphic made famous by Gran Fury and ACT UP (Critical Path AIDS Project 1989a, 27). The tiny icon appears at the end of a long 'Directory of PWA Services', and takes up just an inch on the printed page. It could easily be missed by a reader casually flipping through these listings. The graphic, ubiquitous within late 1980s HIV/AIDS-activist circles and contemporary memorialization projects, takes on a different valence here: this SILENCE = DEATH describes Critical Path's work to connect "PWAs" (people living with AIDS) with treatment information using computer network technologies. 1 Silence marked the consequences of exclusion from new online communication infrastructures, used by treatment activists to create and share up-to-theminute, collaborative health information. Silence, in this case, might mean never hearing a modem's dial tone.To break this silence, Critical Path set out to 'provide up-to-the-minute computernetworked information on support groups, organizational schedules, experimental AIDS medications and protocols, alternative therapies, the best of the AIDS computer bulletin board items, [and] direct services available to PWAs' (Kuromiya 1989, 2). Critical Path provided focused outreach to 'women, IV drug-using communities, and to PWAs of color, the physically challenged, the imprisoned, and the homeless' (Ibid). The organization was one of many HIV/AIDS activist groups that worked online over the course of the 1980s, gathering, synthesizing, and most importantly printing vital information that was otherwise unavailable through mainstream media and public-health agencies. Critical Path's online work presents a significant yet marginal internet history, and another way 1980s activism set the stage for HIV/AIDS's entry into wider publichealth dialogs in the 1990s (Brier 2009;Patton 1996).Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943Kuromiya ( -2000 founded the Philadelphia-based Critical Path Project and edited its newsletter. The first issue was a 28-page long, desktop published, letter-sized, black-and-white document. Heavy with text, each issue included about a dozen articles, most of which were researched and written by Kuromiya, though generally unattributed. These articles were supplemented by listings for support groups, a phone directory and events calendar for PWA services in the tri-state area, and classified ads from supportive businesses and services. Kuromiya wanted to offer wider access to the text-based online Bulletin Board Systems (or 'BBS') he began using in the mid-1980s. To do this, he republished BBS information for those without computer access using two widely accessible and familiar formats: the newsletter, and a telephone hotline he operated out of his home.A reader consulting the masthead of Critical Path's first issue encountered a contributor list made up of many curious acronyms: AIDS Info BBS, AIDS Info Exchange BBS, AIDS FORUM, and HRCF BSS. These 'authors' represented geographic...
This paper argues that scholars of computing, networks, and infrastructures must reckon with the inseparability of “viral” discourses in the 1990s. This co-assembled history documents the reliance on viral analogies and explanations honed in the HIV/AIDS crisis and its massive loss of life, widespread institutional neglect, and comprehensive technological failures. As the 1990s marked a period of intense domestication of computing technologies in the global North, we document how public figures, computer experts, activists, academics, and artists used the intertwined discourses surrounding HIV and new computer technologies to explicate the risks of vulnerability in complex, networked systems. The efficacy of HIV as an analogy is visible in the circulation of viral concepts, fears surrounding interdependence, and emergent descriptions of precarity in the face of a widespread “infrastructure crisis.” Through an analysis of this decade, we show how HIV/AIDS discourses indelibly marked the domestication of computing, computer networks, and nested, digitized infrastructures.
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