Viral Cultures

"This is a timely, important project that adds to the conversations happening now about the early days of AIDS and AIDS activism in the United States and how we remember and document that period in the present and for the future. As we live through another pandemic, the questions Marika Cifor raises about how we document and archive illness and illness politics are especially urgent and necessary."—Lisa Diedrich, author of Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism

"It may be that AIDS activism’s greatest legacy will have been its archival documentation. Marika Cifor runs with that legacy by offering the first full-length study of collections that now exist in institutional repositories. Through her provocative concept of ‘vital nostalgia,’ she explores the affective importance of AIDS activist archives for her queer generation. Viral Cultures itself is an act of curatorial caretaking that keeps HIV/AIDS archival activism alive to do its work in the present."—Ann Cvetkovich, director, Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies, Carleton University
 

"We all have the lethal constraints of a human body; Cifor offers us a pathway to ensure that our most important work, the messy work of living, cannot so easily be erased."—The Atlantic

 

"A particularly salient analysis, given the inequity exposed by COVID-19—and the systemic structures that made both [the AIDS and COVID-19] pandemics worse."—Fast Company

 

"Viral Cultures honors the efforts of activist archivists and artists who built and continue to build archives as forms of respite, healing, and resistance for marginalized communities, even as it critiques the power dynamics and inequalities reflected within the AIDS activist movement and its documentation efforts."—The American Archivist

 

"Cifor deftly demonstrates how activist archival and curatorial practices create a space from within which artists, activists, scholars, and others may productively resist the triumphalist impulse that undergirds so much contemporary AIDS coverage."—H-Net Review