Beyond ACT UP: The Ambivalent Affinities of Personal AIDS Documentaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an attempt to move beyond the activist re-imaginings of the AIDS pandemic that saturate the current media landscape, this thesis professes an alternate archive of personalized documentaries that articulate a counter-history of the AIDS crisis. Rather than merely frame these videos as solipsistic accounts of self-misery during a politicized pandemic, the thesis argues that these texts embody an ambivalent address that not only converses with the dominant politics of activist histories (epitomized by organizations like ACT UP) but also offer differing modes of constructing the self under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Although it discusses a variety of texts from varying national contexts, the primary focus of this thesis is on four films from Canada, the United States, India, and Iran. Divided temporally, the thesis argues for the ways in which these films underscore the corporeal, existential, and familial dimensions of living in the shadow of AIDS. Moving from the negotiation of the altered body in The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter and Silverlake Life (1993) to a queer-of-color critique of a dichotomous understanding of kinship during the AIDS crisis in Summer in My Veins (1999), the thesis underscores the myriad ways in which these personalized documents unsettle the established discourses laid forth by dominant AIDS politics. Finally, in order to draw attention to an ongoing global pandemic, the thesis concludes with Meteor (2023) to re-think notions of AIDS activist struggles first envisioned by AIDS coalitions. By bringing these hitherto marginalized archives into focus, the thesis aims to contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the AIDS crisis beyond the interventions of activist histories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".