Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

COVID-19: Refuse Analogy J ust as we are writing the introduction to this special issue on AIDS, COVID-19 is designated a pandemic. Should we comment on COVID-19? What are the dangers of trying to bring these pandemics into conversation? What can we not yet think or know about COVID-19? In the AIDS intro we discuss the ongoing need to rethink AIDS—we wrote: “Have we begun to ask good questions about AIDS?”—and then everywhere we see coronavirus testing and quarantining graphed with infection and death rates; countries and demographics becoming axes. Many of our contributors start experiencing the effects of COVID-19: some test positive for the coronavirus; friends and family become sick; everyone is in lockdown, and in the deteriorating mental and physical health of quarantine, deadlines become impossible. Crisis provokes a response: asking better questions is replaced with offering quick solutions—what Elaine Scarry, invoking Hannah Arendt, refers to as “emergency thinking” (2012: 19). And yet, having just put together this special issue on AIDS, we cannot help but notice the echoes. COVID-19 exposes and renews the entrenchment of racism and antiblackness in health care, social services, and the US national response. Media outlets report that people with preexisting health conditions and limited access to health care are especially vulnerable, with demographics showing an unequal impact of COVID-19 on Black and brown communities. Antiblackness is carceral; not surprisingly prisons are the most concentrated sites of COVID-19. Perhaps what AIDS and COVID-19 share is antiblackness and racism. Might COVID-19 be a reiteration of these US legacies? COVID-19 has occurred amidst ritualized state sanctioned murder and warfare against Black people by police, from Breonna Taylor to the shooting of Jacob Blake. The moment of COVID-19 has also been one of waves of sustained activism—daily marches and actions against antitrans