Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism

300 Pages·2016·3.377 MB·English

by  Lisa Diedrich

Indirect Action
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Indirect Action
Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS,
and the Course of Health Activism
Lisa Diedrich
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 1 was originally published as “Doing Queer Love: Feminism,
AIDS, and History,” Theoria 112, no. 1 (April 2007): 22– 50. An earlier version of chapter 2 was
originally published as “Que(e)rying the Clinic before AIDS: Practicing Self- Help and Trans-
versality in the 1970s,” Journal of Medical Humanities 34, no. 2 (June 2013): 122–38; published
with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media. An earlier version of chapter 6
was originally published as “Being the Shadow: Witnessing Schizophrenia,” Journal of Medi-
cal Humanities 31, no. 2 (June 2010): 91–1 09; published with kind permission from Springer
Science+Business Media.
Graphic novel excerpts from Epileptic by David B., copyright 2005 by L’Association, Paris,
France; reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any
third-p arty use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties
must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys-
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Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diedrich, Lisa, author.
Indirect action : schizophrenia, epilepsy, AIDS, and the course of health activism / Lisa Diedrich.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003048 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0000-7 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0001-4 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Public health—History. | Social medicine. | Social justice. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Disease & Health Issues. | MEDICAL / History.
Classification: LCC RA424 .D48 2016 (print) | DDC 362.19689—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016003048
For Victoria Hesford
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Contents
Introduction: Illness-Th ought- Activism 1
1. Doing Queer Love, circa 1985 17
Snapshot 1: Gregg Bordowitz’s The Order of Image Production
(2003) and “Queer Structures of Feeling” (1993) 45
2. Que(e)rying the Clinic, circa 1970 53
Snapshot 2: Félix Guattari’s “David Wojnarowicz” (1989) 75
3. Enacting Clinical Experience, circa 1963 79
Snapshot 3: Samuel R. Delany’s Happening (1959) 107
4. Thinking Ecologically, circa 1962 and 1971 113
Snapshot 4: Frantz Fanon’s “Colonial War and Mental
Disorders” (1961) and Isaac Julien’s “Fanon” (1996) 133
5. Drawing Epilepsy 141
Snapshot 5: Disability Law Center’s Investigation of
Bridgewater State Hospital (2014) and
Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) 167
6. Witnessing Schizophrenia 173
Afterimage: ACT UP’s “Drugs into Bodies,” the Near Present 199
Acknowledgments 217
Notes 221
Bibliography 259
Index 275
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Introduction
Illness- Thought- Activism
At AIDS/Activism/Art: Looking Backward/Looking Forward, a 2012 event
commemorating the twenty- fifth anniversary of the founding of the AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP),1 writer and activist Sarah Schul-
man explained that in ACT UP if a particular political strategy or tactic
was tried once and did not work, the group did not try it a second time.
When asked about the short- and long-t erm effects of such an instrumen-
tal politics, Schulman noted ACT UP was primarily a single-i ssue reform
movement with very specific and immediate goals. ACT UP was not a
revolutionary movement, she stated emphatically; people were dying and
wanted simply to survive, not foment revolution.2 Schulman’s comments
intrigued me at the time and have stuck with me since as I have thought
about the relationship between illness, thought, and activism in the period
just before and after AIDS arrived. Schulman offered a succinct, if counter-
intuitive, understanding of the politics of AIDS and especially of ACT UP.
I came to realize what was radical in response to AIDS was locatable not in
the direct action politics of organized protests at specific targets (the Food
and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the New York
City Health Commission, etc.) but in the indirect action of multiple forces
operating prior to the emergence of AIDS that made something like ACT
UP possible. What Schulman’s comments helped me better understand
was, then, the simple fact that illness, thought, and activism all operate
in multiple temporalities. We do them and they happen to us acutely and
chronically, persistently and randomly, directly and indirectly.
The Uses of Indirection
In Indirect Action I consider the conceptual and practical uses of indirec-
tion. In doing so, I don’t mean to suggest ACT UP’s direct action response
to the AIDS crisis and U.S. government inaction beginning in 1987 was
wrongheaded or ineffective. Moreover, although I revisit forms of illness
1