Mapping HIV-related figures of risk in Europe’s blood donation regime

Grasping blood donation as contested grounds for enacting notions of belonging, responsibility and citizenship, this article analyses the role of donor deferral policies in the emergence of a European blood donation regime. We demonstrate how shifts in the moral economy of blood donation that followed from the outbreak of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic led to the prioritisation of donor deferral policies in efforts to enhance blood safety across Europe. We propose the notion "figures of risk" - condensed figurations of those understood to pose risks of HIV infection to themselves and to others - to describe the categories of persons implicated in changing European donor restriction policies. We explore how the Council of Europe’s annually revised Guide to the preparation, use and quality assurance of blood components, first published in 1992, came to legitimise and sustain increasingly contested deferral practices, which have produced shifting groups of persons as European ‘figures of risk’. Qualitative analyses of the Guide’s 19 editions reveal 3 dimensions through which these figures have become increasingly stabilised over time: in terms of their ontology, temporality and risk-related exceptionality. We conclude by asking how collectivising figurations of donors, framed through literature on ‘profiling’, shape notions of European citizenship

The temporal regimes of HIV/AIDS activism in Europe : chrono-citizenship, biomedicine and its others

HIV/AIDS is known to have fundamentally transformed fields of biomedical research, the governance of health, and state-citizen relations. Based on research that was developed to analyze these transformations within HIV/AIDS activism at the European-level, we offer the term chronocitizenship to describe the influence of time in constructs of citizenship. We argue that the temporal regime of biomedicine, or modes of governance that depend on biomedical understandings of time, have come to dominate HIV/AIDS narratives, policies and programs. Building on oral histories and three years of fieldwork in spaces of European-level networks and health-governing bodies, we suggest that citizenship in the field of HIV/AIDS has been defined through multiple, intersecting and, at times, antagonistic temporal regimes. To illustrate this, we expose the regime of loss, through which mourning, often denied space in the present, bears potential for new forms of subjectivity and community; the regime of sustainability, which centers the planning and surveillance of budgets over service provision in a climate unfriendly to human rights; and the regime of chronic crisis, in which persistence becomes a form of political agency against ongoing exclusion and disappointment. As we show, unearthing varied temporalities helps to denaturalize biomedical understandings of time, and invites a rethinking of the foundations needed to reach the ‘end of AIDS’ sought by civil society, UNAIDS and other health-governing bodies

The European HIV/AIDS archive : building a queer counter-memory

Mobilising a queer theoretical framework, by which we mean embracing unhappiness, ephemerality and instability, this chapter reflects on processes of archiving oral histories as part of the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA) by presenting selected challenges and tensions that lie at the heart of remembering, narrating and archiving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the broader European region. The EHAA, an online collection of oral history interviews and digitized materials, has been developed to further establish HIV/AIDS history as part of the broader social memory so as to work through the trauma of mass death and social discrimination, and to document innovations, tensions and inconsistencies in engaging with the epidemic across the region. Building on a growing interest in archiving histories of HIV activism from across Europe and North America, the EHAA project dates back to efforts by the "AIDS History into Museums Working Group" (AKAIM) to preserve such histories in Germany. The project was further developed and expanded in two research projects: ‘Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health’ (EUROPACH) and ‘Don’t criminalize passion! The AIDS crisis and political mobilization in the 1980s and early 1990s in Germany’. Explicitly deviating from an investment in offspring as route for the transmission of memory, the EHAA joins other queer archival work imagined as sites for handing down queer history. The chapter hence argues that the EHAA contributes to queer memory work as a necessary revision of public remembrance and current perceptions of the epidemic, and, at the same time, as a source of inspiration for future activism

Beyond Biological Citizenship: HIV/AIDS, Health, and Activism in Europe Reconsidered

This special section reflects on the challenges and achievements of HIV/AIDS activism in the historico-political context of the European region. While there is substantial literature on activist-driven policy shifts in the different and, particularly, the early stages of the epidemic, much of this has studied Western Europe. Considerably less attention has been given to the broader European region and its constituent countries, especially those along its economic, social and political peripheries. Against this background, through a series of case-studies from differing disciplinary perspectives, this collection offers insights into the evolving conceptions of state state-citizenship relations in the complex and entangled histories of HIV/AIDS in Europe

HIV/AIDS and its monsters. Negotiating criminalisation along the monster–human continuum

We use the concept of the ‘monster’ in this article as an analytical tool to grasp a variety of persons who – understood to be criminals in their countries of residence, and living with or thought to be particularly vulnerable to HIV – are perceived as threats from across the European region. Building on the field of monster studies, we focus here on strategies undertaken to shift the ‘monstrous’ towards the ‘human’ along what we describe as monster–human continuums. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork from Germany, Poland and Greece, four case studies examine processes of (re-)humanisation in the fields of migration, prisons, drug use and sex work that emerge at the intersections of humanitarianism, public health, human rights and citizenship. In particular, we propose that these strategies can entail the production of dissimilar forms of political subjectivity, the redistribution of responsibility or vulnerability and a reshuffling of blame within the moral economy of innocence and guilt – strategies that produce particular norms and forms of the human. These strategies, moreover, involve the normalisation or suppression of ‘abnormal’, ‘irrational’ or ‘guilty’ dimensions of criminalised subjects, thereby taming their capacity to confuse or confront societies’ worldviews, and ultimately foreclosing the possibility to imagine a being-in-the-world otherwise. We thus conclude by asking how embracing the monstrous might facilitate the navigation of cultural, social and moral anxieties that leave room for complex and conflicting practices and subjectivities

HIVstories: Living Politics

How are politics and life narratives in the fields of HIV/AIDS activism entangled? This exhibition explores different ways of living politics from the perspectives of a variety of countries, communities and regions. It focuses on the ways in which lives are shaped by politics, and politics are shaped by lives in Poland, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany and on the European level. The World Health Organisation has identified Europe as a region with the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world. While the impact and spread of the virus unfolds differently and unevenly across the region, it has evoked multiple responses from civil society, religious institutions and European states and governing bodies. A multiplicity of lives and politics demonstrates that the fight against HIV/AIDS cannot be recounted as a single coherent story. Instead, it is presented here as an ongoing struggle with many disparities and a-synchronicities - all of which take on unique expression in each political, legal and social context. Taken together, HIVstories offers a glimpse into the complex, creative and at times contradictory dynamics of HIV/AIDS activism across the region. It reveals Europe as a historically shifting, disputed, and dynamic geographic, social and political entity. The exhibition is made up of objects that have been collected over the course of a three-year international research project. Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (EUROPACH) explores how narratives of the past continue to impact the unfolding of the epidemic. Researchers from Kraków, London, Berlin and Basel, in collaboration with a great many community partner organisations, collected artefacts, archival documents and art works, and conducted oral history interviews with activists, advocates, politicians, bureaucrats and medical practitioners. These lively materials evoke only some of the multiple lives and faces involved in the struggle against HIV/AIDS in the European region. The excerpts from life narratives as presented here, and many more, are part of the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA). Funding for the research that was used to produce this exhibition was generously provided by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) as part of their 3rd Joint Research Programme under the rubric “Uses of the Past.