In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

AIDS is the second-leading cause of death among African American women between the ages of 18 and 44. African American women constitute 63% of all cases of AIDS among women in the United States. This volume brings together the collective wisdom of scholars, researchers, and social work professionals dealing with these concerns. Focusing attention on the primary population of women impacted by AIDS, this book presents culturally sensitive responses that meet the specific needs of African American women. An historical and current overview of the alarming HIV infection rate among African Americans, in particular women, introduces the crisis. Subsequent chapters highlight HIV/AIDS prevention and intervention strategies that are successfully impacting the African American population. Guided by a feminist perspective and grounded in social construction theory, social work theory, and social work practice, this volume privileges the voice of African American women, the group that is the most disenfranchised—and least accurately represented—in AIDS-related research and writing. This essential guide sheds light on a calamity too often overlooked, making it especially valuable for scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners involved with HIV/AIDS issues in the African American community, and with women's and black studies.

HIV-related stigma and discrimination and human rights violations constitute great barriers to preventing HIV infection; providing care, support and treatment; and alleviating the impacts of the epidemic. This publication documents case studies of successful action in different countries addressing HIV-related human rights violations, stigma and discrimination.

In "Holding On," anthropologist Alyson O Daniel analyzes the abstract debates about health policy for the sickest and most vulnerable Americans as well as the services designated to help them by taking readers into the daily lives of poor African American women living with HIV at the advent of the 2006 Treatment Modernization Act. At a time when social support resources were in decline and publicly funded HIV/AIDS care programs were being re-prioritized, women s daily struggles with chronic poverty, drug addiction, mental health, and neighborhood violence influenced women s lives in sometimes unexpected ways. An ethnographic portrait of HIV-positive black women and their interaction with the U.S. healthcare system, "Holding On" reveals how gradients of poverty and social difference shape women s health care outcomes and, by extension, women s experience of health policy reform. Set among the realities of poverty, addiction, incarceration, and mental illness, the case studies in "Holding On" illustrate how subtle details of daily life affect health and how overlooking them when formulating public health policy has fostered social inequality anew and undermined health in a variety of ways."

Despite decades of attention on building a global HIV research and programming agenda, HIV in older populations has generally been neglected until recently. This new book focuses on HIV and aging in the context of ageism with regard to prevention, treatment guidelines, funding, and the engagement of communities and health and social service organizations. The lack of perceived HIV risk in late adulthood among older people themselves, as well on the part of providers and society in general, has led to a lack of investment in education, testing, and programmatic responses. Ageism perpetuates the invisibility of older adults and, in turn, renders current medical and social service systems unprepared to respond to patients’ needs. While ageism may lead to some advantages – discounts for services, for example – it is the negative aspects that must be addressed when determining the appropriate community-level response to the epidemic.

Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained. The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates. More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness. The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.