Forget Burial

HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care

Marty Fink

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978813762, 9781978813779
• eBook ISBN: 9781978813786
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: AIDS & HIV

Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early '90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen families in the present. In unearthing HIV community newsletters, media, zines, porn, literature, and even vampires, Forget Burial bridges early HIV care-giving activisms with contemporary disability movements. In refusing to bury the legacies of long-term survivors and of those we have lost, this book brings early HIV kinships together with ongoing movements for queer and trans body self-determination.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Taking Care
• 1. Silence = Undead: Vampires, HIV Kinship, and Communities of Care
• 2. Caregiving Collations and “Gender Trash from Hell”: Trans Women’s HIV Archives
• 3. Chosen Families: Rejection, Desire, and Archives of Care
• 4. The Gift of Dykes: Naming Desire in Rebecca Brown’s Narratives of Care
• 5. Queering Customs: Unburying Care in My Brother and ACE
• Conclusion: Forget Burial
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author