The politics of AIDS. Introduction

From its first designation as a gay plague, HIV/AIDS has been a heavily politicized disease, a disease that has fractured official standard operating procedures in science, medicine, public health and governance. In many ways, AIDS helped to expose a battleground of contested interests while emerging as an arena for both the re-assertion of 'traditional' (i.e. dominant) values as well as rebellion against the traditional politics of exclusion and privilege. Yet the politics of AIDS has remained an understudied domain. This set of papers seeks to overcome this neglect by exploring underlying political dimensions of the AIDS pandemic, especially in the way the pandemic has been constructed by epidemiology, biomedicine, and medical anthropology. Authored by a group of medical anthropologists and an anthropologically oriented political scientist, the papers provide a jarring glimpse at the profound influence of society on health and disease.