ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how AIDS organizing-its emergence and ongoing evolutionhas been intimately intertwined with the tides of AIDS discourse. It looks at AIDS service organizations (ASOs) as a specific, yet in most industrialized countries predominant, form of civic AIDS organizing. Empirical case studies have described professionalization as deliberately pursued by organizational elites and thus focused on their legitimizing rationales. The chapter describes how the institutionalization of gay AIDS organizations through state policy inclusion worked to the detriment of different paradigms of AIDS organizing in ethnic minorities. Despite the pervasive dominance of a medico-biological view of illness, from a social and cultural point of view, AIDS–and illness more generally–is the product of social constructions rather than an objective given. AIDS-related fears have been greatly magnified by the discursive equation of HIV with death and the contrasting of HIV/AIDS with life and hope.
