Activist archiving in the age of AIDS.

What are we leaving behind, forgetting, and obscuring as we remember AIDS activist pasts? VIRAL CULTURES is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, artists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the US and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, with attention on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, and those developed by community-based organizations such as ACT UP and VISUAL AIDS. This book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age. Cifor is joined here in conversation by Cait McKinney, K.J. Rawson, and Theodore (Ted) Kerr.

Participant bios:

Marika Cifor is a feminist scholar of archival and digital studies. Cifor is assistant professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty member in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington. She is author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS.

Cait McKinney is assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. McKinney’s work includes media histories of LGBTQ+ activists and how they took up Internet technologies in the 1980s and 90s.

K.J. Rawson is associate professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern University. Rawson is founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive and co-chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary.

Ted Kerr is a writer and artist who teaches at The New School. Kerr is a founding member of the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?, and is coauthor, with Alexandra Juhasz, of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production.

Works and people referenced in this episode:

-Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin (Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me!)

-Avram Finkelstein

-Hil Malatino

-Debra Levine

-David Hirsh and Frank Moore, Visual AIDS Archive Project (visualaids.org)

-Maxine Wolfe

-Stephen Shapiro

-Nelson Santos 

-Kia LaBeija (Goodnight, Kia)

-Demian DinéYazhi ́ (NDN AIDS Flag)

-AfterLab (University of Washington, Information School)

-Anna Lauren Hoffmann

-Megan Finn

-Tonia Sutherland

-Marika Cifor: "Presence, Absence, and Victoria's Hair: Examining Affect and Embodiment in -Trans Archives." Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 4 (2015): 645-649.

-Lesbian Herstory Archives

-Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani, eds. AIDS and the Distribution of Crises. Durham, NC:: Duke University Press, 2020.

-Homosaurus: An International LGBTQ Linked Data Vocabulary (homosaurus.org)

-Digital Transgender Archive

-What Would an HIV Doula Do? Collective

-PosterVirus (AIDS ACTION NOW!)

-Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (Ted) Kerr, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production. Durham, NC:: Duke University Press, 2022

-Cait McKinney, Information Activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies. Durham, NC:: Duke University Press, 2020

-ACT UP

-The Archive Project (Visual AIDS)

-The Artist+ Registry (Visual AIDS)

-New York University Fales Library and Special Collections

-ACT UP/NY Records (New York Public Library)

-New York Public Library

-Alex Fialho (Visual AIDS)

-Eric Rhein (Visual AIDS Archive Project)

-Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor. "From human rights to feminist ethics: radical empathy in the archives." Archivaria 81, no. 1 (2016): 23-43.

-Cait McKinney and Dylan Mulvin. "Bugs: rethinking the history of computing." Communication, Culture & Critique 12, no. 4 (2019): 476-498.

-Marika Cifor and Cait McKinney. "Reclaiming HIV/AIDS in digital media studies." First Monday (2020).

-What Does a COVID-19 Doula Do? Zine (ONE Archives at University of Southern California) https://www.onearchives.org/what-does-a-covid19-doula-do-zine/)

-Latino/a Caucus (ACT UP/New York)

-Julián de Mayo