Viral Culture

Contents: About the Collection | Sample Items | Critical Context | Tech

About the Collection

“Viral Cultures: AIDS Ephemera, Art, and Activism” is a curated digital collection of records from disparate archives centered around protest ephemera, art, and social movements during the AIDS epidemic. The purpose of this collection is to provide a focus on the perspectives of these movements across the South, Southwest, and Midwest regions of the United States.

Sample items were selected from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographs, the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, the Linda Wilson Collection, the Resource Center LGBT Collection of the UNT Libraries and the State Historical Society of Missouri. The collection features posters, pamphlets, banners, photographs, buttons, and pins to show the various forms of protest.

The anticipated users of this collection would include researchers interested in queer history, protest, feminism, and the AIDS crisis; teachers using the collection as a tool for relevant courses; queer community members interested in learning about historic events related to their own affinity groups.

Sample Items

Critical Context

Starting in the 1980s, artists, collectives, and other political groups were founded in response to the lack of government intervention in the AIDS epidemic. Many protestors engaged in direct action tactics such as phone zaps, fax zaps, sit-ins in government offices, vigils, die-ins, kiss-ins, marches and demonstrations, and wheat pasting posters in public spaces. Agitprop art was made to provoke the public and as a call to action.

This collection draws attention to the diffuse coalitional nature of various direct action anti-AIDS movements and to highlight how the political, emotional, and cultural dimensions of protest are linked together. This collection focuses on cultural production, that is objects such as ephemera, events such as protest, and spaces such as archives, memorials, and museums that occur external to science and government.

Affect in the Archive

Since the 1990s, there has been a shift in cultural theory and criticism towards a focus on affect. Now known as ‘the affective turn,’ scholars in the humanities and social sciences have increasingly focused on studying emotions and feelings as legitimate objects of inquiry. These approaches intertwine theories concerning subjectivity, the body, critical analysis, and political theories in innovative ways. While affect theory remains a dynamic field, it underscores the importance of understanding how emotions and feelings shape human experiences and societal dynamics. At its core, affect is the force connecting the body and sensation with the external world.

Projects within the affective turn invoke the language and metaphor of ‘the archive’ while focusing on issues that pertain to archival concerns in social justice paradigms, such as representation, identity, bodies, accountability, collective memory, and community empowerment. While these projects may not directly engage with archives as traditionally defined in archival studies, they provide valuable insights, theoretical frameworks, and approaches that can contribute significantly to discussions within the archival field and foster interdisciplinary exchange.

Sources and Additional Resources:

Cheng, J.-F., Juhasz, A., & Shahani, N. (Eds.). (2020). AIDS and the distribution of crises. Duke University Press.

Cifor, M. (2016). “Affecting relations: Introducing affect theory to archival discourse.” Archival Science, 16(1), 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9261-5.

Cifor, M. (2022). Viral cultures: Activist archiving in the age of AIDS. University of Minnesota Press.

Gould, D. B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and act up’s fight against AIDS. The University of Chicago Press.

Jolivétte, A. (2016). Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community. University of Washington Press.

Juhasz, A., & Kerr, T. (2022). We are having this conversation now: The times of AIDS cultural production. Duke University Press.

Lowery, J. (2024). It was vulgar and it was beautiful: How AIDS activists used art to fight a pandemic. Bold Type Books.

Reed, T. V. (2019). ACTing UP against AIDS: The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis. In The art of protest: Culture and activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the present (Second edition). University of Minnesota Press.

Roth, B. (2017). The life and death of ACT UP/LA: Anti-AIDS activism in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the 2000s. Cambridge University Press.

Schulman, S. (2023). Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Picador.