In an episode about Angela Lansbury’s fitness book-video-combo, Positive Moves, Maintenance Phase co-host Aubrey Gordon observed that “it is really difficult to disentangle our motives for weight loss from our attitudes towards fat people.” This small statement captures a central thesis of the incredibly popular podcast. That is, our cultural imagination of “fatness” – or… Read more →
Tag: Stigma
“The Club of the Four Hs”: HIV/AIDS, Race, and Neoliberalism in Argentina
During my childhood in Buenos Aires, adults usually told us to be careful while using telephones and cinema seats because people diagnosed with HIV could hide infected syringes in these “dark spots” to spread the virus. Generally portraying people with HIV as resentful and dangerous, popular representations activated historical racial and sexual boundaries that legitimated… Read more →
Absolutely Disgusting: Wet Markets, Stigma Theory, and Xenophobia
Since the initial descriptions of cases of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, there has been a persistent focus on “wet markets” and their role in spreading the virus. Wet markets are similar to farmers’ markets, offering stalls selling fresh meat and produce, with some markets featuring the slaughtering of animals on-site, which can – albeit… Read more →
Deconstructing HIV and AIDS on The Golden Girls
In 1990, the much-beloved sitcom, The Golden Girls — a show about four older women, Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia, living together in Miami, Florida — was in its fifth season. On February 17, the “72 Hours” episode aired. In it, Rose receives a letter from the hospital where she had gallbladder surgery notifying her… Read more →
Buried Secrets, Living Children: Secrecy, Shame, and Sealed Adoption Records
Between 1945 and 1973, single mothers in the United States gave birth in an era of secrecy and shame that historians of adoption call the Baby Scoop Era (BSE).1 During this time, millions of unwed mothers gave birth to children who they often unwillingly relinquished for adoption. Although precise numbers are elusive, as many as… Read more →
What’s Truly Outrageous About Intersex?
On August 5, the World News Daily Report published an article that has been circulating on my Facebook newsfeed every day since: “Hermaphrodite Impregnates Self, Gives Birth to Hermaphrodite Twins.” Never mind that at the bottom of the webpage, the World News Daily Report publishes the following disclaimer: that it “assumes all responsibility for the… Read more →
The “Right” and “Wrong” Kind of Addict: Iatrogenic Opioid Addiction in Historical Context
Last year, Kelly McEvers of NPR’s Embedded podcast introduced us to Joy. Something about Joy seems so ordinary, even familiar. She’s a certified hospital nurse, a mother of three kids, and a former Girl Scouts leader. She’s from Indiana, America’s heartland. She’s even close with her parents. And like many of us, she suffers from… Read more →
Eyes of the Beholder: The Public Health Service Reports on Trachoma in White Appalachia and Indian Country
In 1912, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) set out to survey trachoma rates among two populations: Appalachian Whites in Kentucky and American Indians. I knew about the American Indian survey from my dissertation research on Native health in the early twentieth century. But when I read the report from that study, I was… Read more →
Silence and Noise: What AIDS Activism and Social Memory Can Teach Us
In the mid-1980s, when I was a twenty-something college dropout, I met people my age or older who knew a lot about history, about our history, the history of queer people. Part of this history included that of the men who were forced to wear the pink triangle in the Nazi concentration camps. And maybe… Read more →
Sex, Death, and Three Irish Women
In November 1984 the Catholic parish of Tynagh, County Galway, Ireland, gathered to bury a woman who had been dead for 150 years.1 Local tradition asserted that the woman, Áine, gave birth to three illegitimate children in the 1830s or 1840s and then became gravely ill. Citing her sexual transgressions, Áine’s parish priest would not… Read more →