AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Console-Ing Passions) - Softcover

Juhasz, Alexandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822316951 ISBN 13: 9780822316954

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

Camcorder AIDS activism is a prime example of a new form of political expression—an outburst of committed, low-budget, community-produced, political video work made possible by new accessible technologies. As Alexandra Juhasz looks at this phenomenon—why and how video has become the medium for so much AIDS activism—she also tries to make sense of the bigger picture: How is this work different from mainstream television? How does it alter what we think of the media’s form and function? The result is an eloquent and vital assessment of the role media activism plays in the development of community identity and self-empowerment.

An AIDS videomaker herself, Juhasz writes from the standpoint of an AIDS activist and blends feminist film critique with her own experience. She offers a detailed description of alternative AIDS video, including her own work on the Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE). Along with WAVE, Juhasz discusses amateur video tapes of ACT UP demonstrations, safer sex videos produced by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, public access programming, and PBS documentaries, as well as network television productions.

From its close-up look at camcorder AIDS activism to its critical account of mainstream representations, AIDS TV offers a better understanding of the media, politics, identity, and community in the face of AIDS. It will challenge and encourage those who hope to change the course of this crisis both in the ‘real world’ and in the world of representation.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexandra Juhasz is Assistant Professor of Film/Video at Pitzer College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Juhasz's perspective as an academic, activist, and videomaker produces an analysis that combines broad social analysis and a culturally informed feminist politics with the work of producing AIDS video. "AIDS TV" challenges the standard disciplinary compartmentalizing of AIDS scholarship and service work and brings a welcome critical focus on a body of work often treated as purely educational, but not as art."--Paula Treichler, University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign

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Aids TV

Identity, Community, and Alternative Video

By Alexandra Juhasz

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1695-4

Contents

1. COVER PAGE, 
2. TITLE PAGE, 
3. COPYRIGHT PAGE, 
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
5. 1 INTRODUCTION TO AIDS TV, 
6. 2 A HISTORY OF THE ALTERNATIVE AIDS MEDIA, 
7. 3 THE POLITICS OF MIMESIS, 
8. 4 THE PLEASURE AND POWER OF SEEING SCIENCE, 
9. 5 CONTAINING AND UNLEASHING THE THREAT: WOMEN'S SEXUALITY IN THE AIDS DOCUMENTARY, 
10. 6 WAVE: A CASE STUDY, 
11. 7 IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, AND ALTERNATIVE AIDS VIDEO, 
12. NOTES, 
13. BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
14. VIDEOGRAPHY, 
15. INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO AIDS TV

AIDS TV: A History and Theory of the Alternative AIDS Media

AIDS TV is dedicated to the recognition, definition, history, and theory of the alternative AIDS media. In this book I focus on the innumerable Videos and television productions about AIDS made outside commercial broadcast television, paying particular attention to my own video project, the Women's AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE). I consider why so much video has been made, how these many tapes function and for whom, how they challenge traditional understandings of the media, and why so much of my life, as is true of many others, has been devoted to the production, viewing, and analysis of AIDS TV. As I attempt to understand how individuals and communities work to change the lived and discursive meanings of AIDS by making video, I am also concerned with the significance of low-end video itself: what is the "alternative" media?

This question is perhaps most fruitfully answered by considering what the alternative media does. The production and reception of alternative AIDS TV are forms of direct, immediate, product-oriented activism which brings together committed individuals who insist upon being industrious. No wonder so many alternative AIDS Videos have been produced. In the few years since AIDS has known a name, hundreds if not thousands of media productions about the crisis have appeared, created by videomakers who work outside commercial (broadcast) television. Since the mid-1980s these projects have challenged and politicized the meanings of both AIDS and video. It is the fact of alternative AIDS video which is initially so compelling. Try as I may, I can think of no other social issue which, in such a brief time, has received this magnitude of attention using the form of video production.

Thus, my first task in this study must be to attempt to understand why. Why have thousands of AIDS Videos produced by artists, community centers, public access stations, ACT UP affinity groups, and high school students come into being? These Videos document AIDS demonstrations, illustrate how to clean intravenous drugworks, interview longtime survivors, depict Cunnilingus through a Dental dam. Why this form of response instead of or in addition to marching, lobbying, or leafleting? What does the fact of the vast alternative AIDS media tell us about AIDS, video, and politics? And, for those of us who are part of the large and diverse community of makers and viewers, why do we make them? Why do we watch them? Is there a value to all of this video?

Since the invention of the motion picture camera, artists, activists, and intellectuals with ideological goals have embraced the technologies which mimetically and aesthetically record movement. From film movements of the 1920s and 1930s in the newly communist USSR, to similar movements some forty years later in the decolonizing Third World, to the movements today of rapidly organizing communities of indigenous peoples around the globe—significant production of political mediamaking occurs when fluctuations in the terrain of Ideology meet with change in the realm of Technology. Film or video movements (like the outpouring of tapes about AIDS) which change the face of film and political history (and, in the process, the lives of the many people who make and view them) occur when rapid changes in politics, theory, and technology align.

The coincidental and not so coincidental lining up of the new video technologies (the Camcorder, satellite, VCR, and relatively low-cost Computer editing) with the AIDS crisis and with theories of postmodern identity politics and multiculturalism is the founding condition upon which the alternative AIDS media is built. The overwhelming needs to counter the (mis)information about AIDS represented on broadcast television, to represent the underrepresented experiences of the crisis, to communicate with others who feel equally unheard, all coincide with the formation of a new condition of media practice, the low- end, low-tech video production made possible by new technologies. The potential of media production for those individuals and communities who never before could afford it or master it occurred just as a social crisis of massive proportions and multiple dimensions begged to be represented in a manner available to the most and the least economically and culturally privileged. The politics of AIDS—the demands for a better quality of life for the people affected by this epidemic— are well matched by the potentials and politics of video.

This said, I must continue to answer the question—"Why the alternative AIDS media?"—by building upon my framework of coinciding conditions, several more conditions specific to the history of AIDS. Because in its earliest and still most well-known manifestation this retro-virus infected the bodies of white gay men in the United States, this community's material, educational, and creative resources serve as a partial inspiration for the astonishing response to AIDS found in video and television. The artists, critics, and "cultural elite"—whose deaths were met with either cultural indifference or blame in a world which had once seemed to be based upon the security of their dominant race, class, and gender—responded in forms with which they were already familiar. Then, too, a body of AIDS theory suggests that this invisible contagion is the logical culmination of the postmodern condition, only manageable in representation, and best managed in postmodernism's definitive discourse—television. AIDS TV abounds because AIDS and television are so similar—discursive, fleeting, all-powerful. Another motivation for this massive media blitz is the lack of a cure for AIDS, making necessary a focus upon preventive education. Since no medium reaches more Americans (literate or not, English-speaking or not) than television, television is the most pervasive and persuasive form for this much- needed AIDS education.

This is what alternative AIDS TV is about: the use of video production to form a local response to AIDS, to articulate a rebuttal to or a revision of the mainstream media's definitions and representations of AIDS, and to form community around a new identity forced into existence by the fact of AIDS. Producing alternative AIDS media is a political act that allows people who need to scream with pain or anger, who want to say, "I'm here, I count," who have internalized sorrow and despair, who have vital Information to share about drug protocols, coping strategies, or government inaction, to make their opinions public and to join with others in this act of resistance. Viewing alternative AIDS television—lying on a couch at home watching a VCR, sitting in church, or among friends and neighbors at a local Screening—is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822316951
• ISBN 13: 9780822316954
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland