Revisiting Corpus: A World AIDS Day Celebration
Revisiting Corpus A World Aids Day Celebration, a special Zoom webinar was held on December 4, 2023 at 5pm.
Watch the webinar here:
2023 marks the 20th anniversary of Corpus, an HIV prevention publication supported by AIDS Project Los Angeles. Between 2003 and 2008, seven issues were developed with guest editors and distributed bi-annually for free across the United States in a circulation of 5,000. Corpus stood out from the mainstream HIV space for several reasons. Corpus was an art and literary journal that invited readers to resist the ways the AIDS industry pathologized queer people’s lives and bodies. Corpus was an invitation to gay, bi, trans, and queer people to tell stories about desire, pleasure, gender, age, class, race, and place as a strategy to make meaning of HIV and its disproportionate impact on Black and Brown queer people. Contributors didn’t have to be accomplished researchers, epidemiologists, clinicians, or authors – although a few were. Corpus was a creative act of defiance against an industry intent on defining and containing with little say from those people living with and most affected by HIV. Corpus was a strategy for retaking HIV discourse, a discourse that was otherwise conspicuously and ironically silent about sex. Corpus was a pre-social media, printed object of beauty meant to be held, handled, studied, caressed, and come back to again and again for renourishment. Corpus was both censored and held, much in the same way that our bodies have been. Now, nearly 20 years since the first publication, Corpus’ importance is worth revisiting.
Featuring the following speakers:
George Ayala
Jaime Cortez
Gayatri Gopinath
JD Davids
Alexandra Juhasz
Pato Hebert
Moderated by Professor Carlos Decena. Interim ISGRJ Campus Director, Rutgers–New Brunswick, Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life, Associate Professor and Acting Chair, Latino and Caribbean Studies and Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
