Hey all, this is the author here. Thanks for sharing and comments. I usually don't respond to these threads, although I am sometimes tempted to because of misunderstandings about my work that have been disheartening (and at times hurtful) on this forum. I live with POTS and EDS and believe we have related struggles and challenges. As someone above said, it is difficult to tell the direction of this article from the abstract alone, because my argument as versus the content of the article isn't fully spelled out in the 150 word limit: I am critiquing the notion of "lesbian AIDS" by looking at problematic comparisons lesbian writers made in the 90s that absolutely obscured women with AIDS and didn't do much to advance the cause, despite mostly good intentions. As others have said, comparisons between AIDS/ME/LC are really thorny, which is what the article is arguing. My email is off of my website due to doxxing I experienced, but you can message me here for this article and any others you may want. Happy to share PDFs. Hope you can read with an open mind and of course the knowledge that writing in the humanities is very different than in scientific and public health journals. I look at the social and cultural dynamics as the last response noted, and I am interested in how they lead to the oppression and dismissal of PwME so that we may combat it on multiple fronts.
Cheers,
Emily
Hello
I found the title concerning due to my understanding of jokes from the 90s UK that it was unfair lesbians wouldn’t get AIDS (which is untrue, in particular in instances in South Africa of so called “corrective rape”). Even in 1999 the film “Boys Don't Cry” was released, I think there was some understanding that women and trans men are always at risk of rape by men.
I think we in the UK in recent years there has been a move to remember the role of the lesbians who are nurses and caregivers who rallied round to look after the men dying of AIDS in hospital and the subsequent change of landscape (or not, looking at you RVT) in gay and lesbian culture where gay pubs were geared to men and didn’t even have female toilets, so unwelcome were lesbians in the 70s and 80s. Often the only nurses willing to look after AIDS patients were lesbians.
I mentioned South Africa and it’s worth mentioning that I have a UK view, I don’t have an African or South American view but I know in both places lesbians often had to hide their sexuality and marry men, in any case in more religious societies like these AIDS was rampant in men and women due to lack of contraception and education, meaning lots of women and lesbians had AIDS.
It’s a particularly triggering title, and if it can’t be easily explained in a few words, or even 150, then I think it’s a bad title, and it will put some people off. If some lesbian writers wrote pieces which unintentionally obscured the experience of women with AIDS over 30 years ago in the last century then that’s a shame but honestly all I can see this title doing is offending a lot of people like me, or giving a good laugh to people who aren’t at all like me and I don’t want to converse with. It sounds like you’re punching down on lesbians. It sounds homophobic.
Am I correct in surmising that your titular paper is not about lesbians or AIDS and is about ME/CFS?
Have you thought of just talking about that and not lesbians or AIDS? Or using a better, less complex and more relevant metaphor? Women and their experiences have been erased throughout history, on a much larger scale than this incident you have selected so I am sure you can find an alternative example, unless it is the “click bait” horror of the title which drew you to it?
Personally I’m not a fan of ME/CFS “appropriating” other circumstances, having lived through Hillsborough (although I can see why people make comparisons on an intellectual level, I don’t like it) ME/CFS is bad enough as is without comparing and contrasting it to AIDS or Hillsborough or any other trauma, some of us already have the trauma.
Edited to add more because this is super upsetting
