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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.
“At a moment when reproductive freedom is under coordinated assault, courts are stripping away rights, and HIV/AIDS funding is being decimated, Jallicia Jolly’s Ill Erotics is timely and essential. Writing with the keen perspective of a reproductive justice scholar, activist, and Jamaican daughter of the diaspora, Jolly centers the stories of sixteen Black Jamaican women living with HIV/AIDS as theorists of freedom, care, and survival. These women do far more than endure: Through erotic autonomy, mothering, mutual aid, and grassroots organizing, they creatively forge practices of self-making that protect their own bodily autonomy and expand the horizon of reproductive justice for us all. Brilliant, intimate, and politically urgent, this book will transform how we understand HIV/AIDS, Black Caribbean feminism, and the struggle for reproductive justice.”—Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
“A powerful study of how Black Jamaican women living with HIV navigate marginality, resist pathologizing discourses, and fashion grassroots empowerment. Carefully exploring sexual and erotic subjectivity, Ill Erotics also reveals the daily shaping of reproductive justice by and for Black women that resonates worldwide. A vital new contribution to Black and Caribbean feminist studies.”—Kamala Kempadoo, Professor Emerita, York University, and author of Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labour.
“What does it mean to be deserving of care? With Ill Erotics, Jallicia Jolly bears witness to the complex webs of structural violence and stigma—hangovers of both colonialism and global humanitarianism—that surround birthing while Black, poor, and HIV positive. More critically, she provides insights into how women claim bodily autonomy, dignity, and community while navigating life with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Throughout this moving text, Jolly offers a model of transnational Black feminist epistemology through mourning practices, through an expansive conceptualization of responsibility and accountability, and through solidarity and co-imagination. Ill Erotics is the beautiful text we need right now to conceptualize care and connection through both survival and pleasure!”—Deborah A. Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania
“Ill Erotics offers a sobering reminder that for working-class and poor Black Jamaican women, the ‘end of AIDS’ remains beyond reach because global health approaches to HIV/AIDS overlook racial, gender, and class inequalities in access to health care and other basic necessities. At the same time, Jolly's captivating ethnography illuminates new possibilities for HIV/AIDS care, activism, and scholarship through its careful documentation of Black women's resistance to biomedical categories of illness and their strategies for leveraging motherhood toward political action. Ill Erotics tells a powerful story of global health, HIV/AIDS, and reproductive justice.”—Siri Suh, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University, and author of Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal
“Ill Erotics explores with depth and poignancy how HIV-positive Jamaican women navigate staggering constraints with vibrancy, shrewdness, and commitments to self and community care. Jolly brilliantly combines ethnography, storytelling, historical contextualization, and feminist analysis rooted in reproductive justice frameworks, making this book extraordinarily important and original.”—Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
“A highly original contribution to an emerging field of scholarship, Ill Erotics examines the agency of Black women living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, one of the primary hot spots for HIV infections in the Caribbean. The book offers a unique analysis of HIV/AIDS and navigating sexual desire and pleasure as a source of reclamation of dignity and agency, all while expertly maintaining the authenticity of the women’s voices. It avoids the extractive, colonizing nature of much ethnographic research, presents an excellent analysis of the structural conditions of Jamaica and the impacts on sexual behaviors, and offers an innovative connection between dancehall culture and sexual agency.”—Loretta Ross, coauthor of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction