CfP: ids before Aids - "Quaderni storici" monographic issue
Historical reflections on epidemics and contagions
have long pointed to the complexity of these phenomena, within which the
'natural' dimension of disease and its spread is intertwined with the social
and cultural considerations that identify it, along with moral and political
readings that seek factors and subjects to which responsibility can be traced
and causality of contagion explained.
In these terms, research showed how epidemics are
socially and culturally dense phenomena, in which these and other different
elements mark ways and times of social and institutional response to contagion.
Thus, it became clear how the social and institutional response is marked in no
small measure by moral and cultural instances that look to the transgression of
norms as the main factors in both contagion and spread.
In the context of historical reflections on epidemics,
AIDS has always been a relevant historical example through which to grasp the
epistemological complexity of epidemics and their social and political repercussions.
Since its emergence, AIDS has manifested itself as an
epidemic with an evident global projection. Cause to date of more than
thirty million deaths distributed on a global scale, AIDS has signaled a
differentiated course of contagion very much linked to the contexts in which it
has spread.
Analyses of geneticists and epidemiologists focused on
the natural history of the disease have traced genealogies, chronologies and
periodizations of AIDS, placing the origin of this infection in 1920s Congo. Historical
research has interrogated the complexity of this epidemiological phenomenon, in
its natural and cultural interweaving, focusing on the development of the
epidemic in the United States since the late 1970s and then from there in
Europe. Historians have emphasized continuities, transformations, and mutations
occurred in the social and cultural form of the epidemic that have allowed us
to question chronologies and periodizations.
While in the African continent, to which research has
traced the origin of the contagion, AIDS has manifested itself as a widely
spread epidemic capable of deeply affecting local economies, as well as social
and institutional structures, in the Western North American and European
contexts, AIDS has been configured instead as a “minority epidemic,” caused by
the transgression of norms - moral, social, hygienic - symbolized in the four
H-Risk groups (homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, Haitians).
The transnational dimension of AIDS has thus clearly
re-proposed questions about 1) how in different contexts and moments the
epidemic is identified, defined, addressed, and governed; 2) how these
processes act, are interconnected, and influence the definition of
institutional responses to the epidemic and the social perceptions of the
“sick”; and 3) how the AIDS epidemic itself relates to the redefinition of
processes of citizenship promoted by those primarily affected by the infection.
In the experience of AIDS, those processes proper to
the history of epidemics return, which have seen the social construction of
figures - from the plague-spreader to Typhoid Mary, from patient zero to the
super-spreader - to whom responsibility for both epidemic and contagion can be
traced – a social process active particularly in those historical moments in
which the properly biological dimension of the epidemic is not yet clearly
identified.
This issue of “Quaderni storici” aims to focus on the transitional phase, so to speak, the one in which contagion emerges, manifests itself, acts, causing sickness and death, but without yet being understood, nor known in its pathological characters, etiologies, and therapies. What are the social practices - including institutional practices in their contextual genesis - acting at this historical juncture in which the concrete experience of illness collides with the absence of terms and interpretations to counter it? What cultural and social processes are activated to deal with something that is both concretely active and culturally incomprehensible? How do these processes involve sexuality and the history of the way in which it has been thought of, signified, governed?
Proposals (3500 characters, 500 words approx.)
accompanied by a short CV should be sent by April 15th, 2023 to editors
Emmanuel Betta and Domenico Rizzo. Selected essays, due in their final versions
by October 1st 31, 2023, will undergo the peer review process
(anonymous in both senses). The monographic volume is scheduled for release
in the second issue of 2024.
Contact Info:
Emmanuel Betta
Domenico Rizzo