Disabled activists in the United States brought unique expertise to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, including understanding social stigma and health as social justice issues and approaching information as a complex access problem. Disproportionately affected Deaf communities mounted a response that carefully blended face-to-face caring practices with mediated information by and for deaf people grappling with HIV. San Francisco’s Deaf AIDS Information Center (DAIC) advocated for wider access to Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) in the AIDS service sector while also marking this text and modem-based machine’s inadequacies as a substitute for the high-touch, one-to-one interpretive work needed by many ASL users. Crossovers among media, AIDS, and disability justice histories are underdocumented and risk seeming minor. Through our analysis of the DAIC, we argue that this intersection is key to advancing knowledge of how HIV left an imprint on emerging communication technologies and how sexuality and disability factor in technological cultures.
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Winter 2023
Research Article|
January 01 2023
High-Touch Media: Caring Practices at the Deaf AIDS Information Center
Cait McKinney,
Cait McKinney
Cait McKinney is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University and the author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke, 2020).
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Dylan Mulvin
Dylan Mulvin
Dylan Mulvin is Assistant Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (MIT, 2021).
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Feminist Media Histories (2023) 9 (1): 98–122.
Citation
Cait McKinney, Dylan Mulvin; High-Touch Media: Caring Practices at the Deaf AIDS Information Center. Feminist Media Histories 1 January 2023; 9 (1): 98–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.1.98
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