So a few weeks ago I blogged about a conference in Toronto coming up next March titled, "Lumpen-City: Discourses of Marginality | Marginalizing Discourses" (website). I just sent in the following abstract for a paper on my activist-research work within the Gay Men's Health Movement to resist Public Health discourses RE: Gay Men's Health. We'll see if they accept! It would be fun to talk activisty at an academic conference.

Resisting Public Health: Working Within the Gay Men’s Health Movement to Produce Change

Abstract:

Soon after the virus that causes AIDS was discovered and the mechanics of its transmission understood, public health scholars began churning out biomedical and behavioral scholarship that reinterpreted gay men’s sexual behaviors and cultures that were once hailed as liberatory as irrational and pathological, implicitly arguing that AIDS was the price paid for the hedonism of the 1970s. Pleasure became dangerous, contaminating, and – most of all – potentially deadly. How can social scientists resist this disease / risk paradigm, which has eclipsed possibilities for research that celebrates sexuality, rather than denigrating its practitioners? In this paper, I relate my experiences as an activist-researcher working within the Gay Men’s Health Movement to engage fellow activists at every stage in my research process: Design, Data Collection, Analysis, and Reporting. Every piece of my research project was directly informed and shaped by countless conversations, workshop presentations, working groups, blog posts, and online forum discussions about my research project with other Gay Men’s Health activists. I argue that this kind of meaningful communication and collaboration with the communities represented in my research is crucial to resisting the pathologizing tendencies inherent in 21st century Public Health scholarship, and can serve as a model for future scholars hoping to resist marginalizing discourses in their field.