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The fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the COVID-19 outbreak, and landmark struggles for reproductive justice has illuminated interconnected health inequities faced by Black women globally. As the first book-length ethnographic study to focus on Black girls and women living with HIV in the Anglophone Caribbean, Ill Erotics shows how women’s everyday lives contrast with widely circulated “end of AIDS crisis” narratives that equate biomedical progres with the end of the epidemic and prioritize individual responsibility for HIV self-management. Jallicia Jolly chronicles how these women navigate the contradictory interventions of the state, biomedicine, humanitarianism, and HIV/AIDS organizations. She argues that the grassroots practice of care enables a Black feminist infrastructure that centers interdependence, sexual agency, and political mobilization while repurposing discourses of shame, isolation, and contagion as ill erotics.
Jallicia Jolly is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and American Studies at Amherst College. She is founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective, an interdisciplinary medical humanities lab.