The War on Sex Sex is an important site of social control, adjudication, and- ultimately -oppression. Many social movement organizations have focused on sexual health and do not generally frame their work in terms of social justice or civil rights. The failed attempts to decriminalize HIV in the Virginia legislature, both within and outside the General Assembly, are both troubling and deserving of critical examination, and yet they are just pieces of a much larger puzzle comprising legal, social, and economic systems that do not readily seem to fit together. Institutional ethnography: Interrelationships among the General Assembly, Virginia Department of Health, and community organizations working to repeal the laws criminalizing HIV in the Commonwealth are each a subject of analysis here… The Problems of Prospective: “Thinking Sex” From the beginning, this issue was not seen for what it truly was and is: a war on sex. By only problematizin
As a scholar with specific subject matter expertise in anthropology and public health, and as an individual living with HIV, a first generation college student, and queer man with history of substance abuse whose work and life are deeply intertwined, I have derived a lot of comfort and hope in bearing witness to the power of community coalitions while accompanying community leaders and advocates in mobilizing to take care of one another, to act, and to engage in necessary fights around issues that have long been in existence: universal and meaningful healthcare, abolition, housing rights, equal employment, gender equality, environmental justice, and rights of marginalized communities, displaced populations, migrants and immigrants. I have worked alongside community leaders, activists, and health and social providers in the field of HIV and disease prevention who have long refused to accept the status quo, and have instead, created their own forms of care or reimagined the existing sy