Impure Hopes

The experiment in China that produced the world's first babies with “edited” DNA comes out of an international research program aimed at producing an HIV cure. An atmosphere of secrecy surrounded this experiment at the edge of the law. Volunteers who signed up for the experiment were HIV-positive tonzghi—gay and bisexual “comrades” already living with closely guarded secrets and conflicted desires. Impure hopes—a mix of heterosexual dreams about reproductive futurity and biotech speculation about an HIV cure—drove the research forward. Volunteers were caught between dreamworlds, harboring hopes that were not entirely their own. The story of these patients is tangled up with CRISPR, a fast and cheap tool for manipulating DNA that contains tantalizing promises of medical breakthroughs for innovators and investors. Speculation in the innovation economy produced an earlier gene-editing experiment in the United States that brought HIV-positive veterans of ACT UP together with biotechnology entrepreneurs. After achieving promising results, a fickle market pushed gene-editing enterprises away from HIV cure research. Building on earlier work about impure science, this article makes an argument against purity to consider the contours of hope in ethically compromised times. Hope demands ongoing articulation work. As powerful political and economic forces threaten to steal queer hopes or simply capitalize on them, it is important to make our own ethical, political, and discursive cuts—to selectively renew some articulations while breaking other connections.

Créer pour mieux voir : Image(s) du sida et enjeux de la représentation dans '120 battements par minute'

À travers l’analyse du film de Robin Campillo 120 battements par minute (2017), cet article se propose d’interroger le rôle des images dans notre conceptualisation de l’épidémie de sida. En choisissant de porter à l’écran un pan de l’histoire française récente dont la fiction s’est peu emparée – les lutte menées par Act Up-Paris durant les années 1990 – le film s’attache à effectuer un réexamen du passé du point de vue de celles et ceux qui ont combattu pour une plus grande justice sociale mais qui ont longtemps été relégués aux marges. Comme le montrera cet article, en prenant pour sujet une association dont le message politique reposait en grande partie sur l’image qu’elle véhiculait et qui se voulait un contrepoids aux discours politique et médical de l’époque, le film participe d’une mise en abyme des enjeux de la représentation et du regard qu’elle induit. Cela nous amènera à réfléchir sur la force du visuel à incarner un message, ainsi que sa capacité à nous amener à penser le monde social. Nous nous intéresserons plus particulièrement à la relation entre image, mémoire et connaissance à travers une analyse sémiotique de l’image filmique qui nous permettra de mettre en avant le phénomène de réflexivité à l’œuvre au sein du film. Dans cette optique, nous observerons la manière dont Campillo crée des images qui ont une fonction double : mettre à jour la convergence de l’intime et du collectif qui irriguait les actions d’Act Up-Paris et donnait au visuel sa force contestataire, tout en inscrivant sa propre représentation dans une démarche mémorielle dont le but est d’enrichir nos connaissances vis-à-vis du sida et des luttes menées par des individus trop longtemps « invisibilisés ».

Counterpublic Goods in Interesting Times: Transitional Subjectivities Onstage at Highways Performance Space, 1989–1993

A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists’ demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming recession; and an escalating housing crisis fueled by accelerating income inequality: welcome to Los Angeles between 1989 and 1993. In this period, AIDS became the leading cause of death for US men ages 25–44; ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)/LA called public health infrastructure to account and successfully fought for an AIDS ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. A widely circulated video of Los Angeles Police Department officers viciously beating Black motorist Rodney King, and their subsequent acquittal of criminal charges by a suburban jury, ignited five days of antiracist rebellion. The rising number of unhoused people in Los Angeles was becoming difficult to ignore, though not for the city's, state's, or federal government's lack of trying. “Multiculturalism” became a widely embraced—if sometimes cynically deployed—aesthetic and programming imperative.

Andy and Me (It’s Not Real and It’s Not Fiction)

This chapter charts the influence of Andy Warhol on filmmaker Tom Kalin and provides an overview of Kalin’s films as well as his activism. From experimental videos such as They are lost to vision altogether (1989) to his features, Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007), Kalin has drawn on Warhol’s cinematic language and bold sexual and gender politics. The chapter also depicts Kalin’s work with the activist collectives ACT UP and Gran Fury. Gran Fury formed to give voice to the political issues surrounding AIDS in America. This eleven-person collective devised appropriation strategies to simultaneously utilize and critique Madison Avenue vernaculars, and circumnavigate questions of access. Named for the automobile used by the New York City police (and also sounding like “big anger”), Gran Fury created public works that drew attention to medical, moral, and political issues related to AIDS.

Abjection overruled! Time to dismantle sexist cyberbullying in academia

In this essay, we draw on a personal experience of sexist cyberbullying unleashed, on social media, against one of our academic papers, to act up against increasing instances of cybersexism, in the academy. Reading our experience in the context of feminist insights on impurity and abjection, we assert the need to dismantle cybersexism targeting non-conforming academic knowledge, namely feminist. We also discuss the potentials of the cyberspace to provide opportunities for communal solidarity, as a source of empowerment for targets of academic cybersexism. Writing this text is an activist expression of voice and resistance, whereby we call our community to collective action and increased institutional support against sexism in academia, particularly in online spaces.

ACT Up TIL Now: The Evolution of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes in Adoptive Cell Therapy for the Treatment of Solid Tumors

The past decades of cancer immunotherapy research have provided profound evidence that the immune system is capable of inducing durable tumor regression. Although many commercialized anti-cancer immunotherapies are available to patients, these treatment options only scrape the surface of the potential immune-related treatment possibilities for cancer. Additionally, many individuals are ineligible for established immunotherapies due to their cancer type. The adoptive cell transfer of autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes has been used in humans for over 30 years to treat metastatic melanoma, and continued modifications are making it increasingly more effective against other types of cancer. This comprehensive review outlines this therapy from its infancy through to the present day, bringing to light modifications and optimizations to the traditional workflow, as well as highlighting the influence of new methods and technologies.

Opportunity-as-Hologram, real or artificial in Entrepreneurship

<div> <div> <div> <p>Entrepreneurship concerns actions under uncertainties. Situated within that uncertainties are opportunities that entrepreneurs seek. How are these opportunities seen? Within the entrepreneurial opportunities are seeds with potentialities. Potentialities for profits. They are the reasons that entrepreneurs act up to exploit and to set in motion the entrepreneurial emergence. The intentionality follows with construction of a coherent set of activities or incoherent intuitive moves to pursue the opportunity, including injecting resources and mobilizing social and material networks. How are opportunities discovered, and perceived? The current academic debates feature discovery and creation. Are they existing independently, with pre-existing reality, even without being observed? Or as some argued that opportunities are not pre-existing in space and time with an objective existence but are subjectively and socially constructed. On contact with such opportunities, what spur entrepreneurs to act and what are the forces at work? Are they real or artificial? Can they be holographic representation and provide cues and signals to entrepreneurs to act? Can opportunity-as-hologram explains how entrepreneurs get inspired and motivated to pursuing the opportunities? </p> <p>This paper will explore, revisit and recast perspectives on opportunities and addressing the subtle conceptual issues at the core of entrepreneurship theories that hold the two views, discovery and creation of opportunities to be both valid and mutually non-exclusive, on holographic terms. In the discussion, this paper will explore implicate order and explicate order which are quantum theory concepts theorized by physicist David Bohm as these theories were developed to explain the bizarre and unpredictable behaviours of subatomic particles, which have strong semblance to the same free-spiritedness and free-will self-organization behaviours of entrepreneurs. </p> <p>Our theorization will have implications for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial researches relating to quantum science references. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Opportunity-as-Hologram, real or artificial in Entrepreneurship

<div> <div> <div> <p>Entrepreneurship concerns actions under uncertainties. Situated within that uncertainties are opportunities that entrepreneurs seek. How are these opportunities seen? Within the entrepreneurial opportunities are seeds with potentialities. Potentialities for profits. They are the reasons that entrepreneurs act up to exploit and to set in motion the entrepreneurial emergence. The intentionality follows with construction of a coherent set of activities or incoherent intuitive moves to pursue the opportunity, including injecting resources and mobilizing social and material networks. How are opportunities discovered, and perceived? The current academic debates feature discovery and creation. Are they existing independently, with pre-existing reality, even without being observed? Or as some argued that opportunities are not pre-existing in space and time with an objective existence but are subjectively and socially constructed. On contact with such opportunities, what spur entrepreneurs to act and what are the forces at work? Are they real or artificial? Can they be holographic representation and provide cues and signals to entrepreneurs to act? Can opportunity-as-hologram explains how entrepreneurs get inspired and motivated to pursuing the opportunities? </p> <p>This paper will explore, revisit and recast perspectives on opportunities and addressing the subtle conceptual issues at the core of entrepreneurship theories that hold the two views, discovery and creation of opportunities to be both valid and mutually non-exclusive, on holographic terms. In the discussion, this paper will explore implicate order and explicate order which are quantum theory concepts theorized by physicist David Bohm as these theories were developed to explain the bizarre and unpredictable behaviours of subatomic particles, which have strong semblance to the same free-spiritedness and free-will self-organization behaviours of entrepreneurs. </p> <p>Our theorization will have implications for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial researches relating to quantum science references. </p> </div> </div> </div>