I have been thinking a lot about ACT-UP over the weekend. They responded to a global pandemic by fighting racism, homophobia and capitalism. They did not try to ban sex, sharing needles or even unprotected sex.
They did community education, of course, but their focus was getting governments to take the disease seriously by funding research and education and, importantly sharing the fruits of that funding with the people who needed it.
They also fought to end stigma. They wanted to be able to move freely in all crowded spaces. This when carrying a virus that destroyed the immune system so that opportunistic respiratory infections would likely kill them. They certainly never insisted that people should mask up or isolate. The opposite in fact. It was like the experience of the disease taught them to celebrate human fragility and life rather than fetishising an idea of health that would treat humans as isolated machines that must function at maximum efficiency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Q8p0HCQEs
In our recent pandemic the opposite happened. It is not that lock downs and masks were the wrong response. Covid is not HIV, but where were and are the calls for decent sick pay? There was and is no critique of global systems that meant that the vast majority of the world could not afford to isolate and surprisingly enough kept covid spreading. Instead we had a call for harder borders. Where is the push for adequate funding of healthcare worldwide? Ending IP on medicines? Decent ventilation as a design standard? Retrofitting buildings to ensure airflow?
There was no critique of poverty and its racialized and gendered dimension. Instead we were meant to believe that queer people and black people were somehow uniquely vulnerable to the disease. It was nothing to do with poor housing and lack of options.
It is like we have come to believe that the only way to effect change is to be a good little citizen who separates her recycling, votes every five years and tries to get her neighbours to do the same. But of course we need to work together because power is collective. It is not the aggregate of individual actions. It is what we do together and that involves sharing bodily fluids because we are fragile. We are human.
#ActUp, #Pandemic, #Power, #Politics
Damien Van Achter
Dan Wentzel 🏳️🌈
Advocate.com
MikeDunnAuthor
optimistique33
vagancio pirato
Roberto von Archimboldi
