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Histories of HIV/AIDS in Western Europe: New and Regional Perspectives ed. by Janet Weston and Hannah J. Elizabeth (review)

2024; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 117 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/his.2024.a928553

1918-6576

George J. Severs,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Reviewed by: Histories of HIV/AIDS in Western Europe: New and Regional Perspectives ed. by Janet Weston and Hannah J. Elizabeth George J. Severs Weston, Janet, and Hannah J. Elizabeth, eds. – Histories of HIV/AIDS in Western Europe: New and Regional Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. 245 p. This impressive edited collection is a major contribution to historical scholarship on HIV/AIDS. Interest in the history of the epidemic has been growing in recent years, a development which the pioneering British historian of HIV/AIDS Virginia Berridge describes as a "second wave" in her foreword to this volume (p. xviii). The essays comprising this book offer new perspectives on the ways in which HIV/AIDS was experienced, responded to, and understood in Western European contexts over the last 40 years. Histories of HIV/AIDS in Western Europe began life as a workshop at Birkbeck, University of London in July 2018. As part of the AIDS Cultures and Histories Festival, which ran alongside the meeting of the International AIDS Society in Amsterdam, a group of scholars of HIV/AIDS gathered from across Europe and North America to share new research. What emerged was the strikingly similar concern with regional particularities that animated these studies. The contributors to this book have developed these areas of interest into chapters that offer rich, insightful histories, demonstrating the dividends which are paid to scholars who look with clarity and precision to the local. The editors' introduction not only sets up the chapters which follow, it also offers a rigorous contribution in its own right. Weston and Elizabeth provide a critical reframing of the term "AIDS capital," which was frequently used throughout the late twentieth century to describe cities in which cases of HIV diagnoses or AIDS-related deaths were seen as particularly high. "AIDS capital" was a loaded term, and in unpacking it, the editors reveal the anxieties about permissiveness, urban excess, and "liberal politics" that, alongside prejudiced attitudes towards gay men and drug users in particular, coalesced into the alarmist moralizing that characterized so many responses to the epidemic. They further demonstrate that the notion of the "AIDS capital" underscores the importance of locality in HIV/AIDS histories. "The idea of an 'AIDS capital,'" Weston and Elizabeth write, "made the [End Page 235] problem geographically limited, constrained within city limits and often safely located among people and places 'elsewhere'" (p. 8). Such a division often constructed AIDS as an urban problem, contrasting it with rural areas unaffected by HIV (or, in this logic, the causative developments of permissiveness and social liberalism). But, as this volume shows, certain communities and areas within cities also situated themselves in relation to an "other" more at risk of HIV/AIDS than they. When those superficial boundaries were breached, disquiet often ensued. Brian DeGrazia demonstrates this well in his chapter on the opening of an AIDS care centre, the Villa Glori Casa famiglia per malati di AIDS, in Rome's affluent Parioli neighbourhood. Residents of this area saw the presence of an AIDS centre in their midst not only as incongruous but, in DeGrazia's words, "as a driver of social contamination, bringing groups that were either socially or spatially marginalised into richer and more desirable neighbourhoods in the city centre, where they and their problems did not belong" (p. 66). Such anxieties played out in ways specific to the particular locales in question, but they were not exclusive to Rome. Plans to open "Tyddyn Bach, Wales' first HIV/AIDS respite centre" on the rural North Welsh coast, starkly divided local opinion, delaying developments by a full two years (pp. 149–150). The centre finally opened in 1997, but the issue made clear local anxieties over HIV/AIDS, which many in Wales continued to see as "an English disease" that was either not relevant to the Welsh or risked putting them in danger (p. 140). The chapters in this book that take a more top-down approach still emphasize the national particularities of their case studies. Ketil Slagstad and Anne Kveim Lie's analysis of sex workers and HIV/AIDS in Norway, for example, offers a revealing case study of activist collaboration with the state in...