ABSTRACT
From the epidemic's dawn, AIDS activists have been deeply aware of the ways that the body is constituted through biomedical and social scientific discourse, painfully cognizant of how that body is constrained through the public policies and health education programs developed from the research disciplines. Nevertheless, we are also desperately dependent on precisely those scientific institutions and practices for any hope of medical care, anti-discrimination statutes, or prevention programs. Thus, activists and cultural critics concerned with the epidemic are in the precarious position of deconstructing AIDS discourse and resisting its policing practices while inhabiting the bodies constituted through them, of living the material effects of the representations and policies into which we have sought to intervene. But while wrenching, this complicated, sometimes masochistic refusal to simply be the bodies of epidemiology has enabled theoretical and practical work that is exciting, volatile, and surprisingly effective.
