A Transnational History of HIV/AIDS Denial: Origins, manifestations, and persistence, 1981 to the present

As long as there have been interventions to understand, prevent, and treat HIV and AIDS, there have been those who deny HIV causes AIDS, or that the virus and the syndrome even exist at all. HIV/AIDS denialist beliefs have been linked to numerous preventable HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths, particularly in post-apartheid South Africa. The life and death nature of HIV/AIDS denialism motivated many to silence its ideas and activists without investigating its origins, antecedents or links to wider medical skepticism and patient activism. This project will examine the transnational history of this HIV/AIDS denial and its consequences within the UK and Australia, from its origins to the present. Drawing on a carefully assembled toolkit of historical, literary, and cultural studies methods, it will ask how, when and why people engaged in HIV/AIDS denial to provide new understandings of denialism as medical heterodoxy, and transform concepts of medical resistance by rooting them in historically-mutable identities, affective attachments, cultural systems, and transnational communication technologies. In illuminating the historical roots of denialism, the project will provide the foundations for new approaches to addressing denial, that move beyond shaming to consider the rootedness of subjectivities, technologies, and values motivating denialist activism.