Such a well-conceived, trenchant, carefully balanced collection. These essays explicitly interrogate the Western "response to" better termed, engagements with HIV/AIDS and its contingencies, rebooting our knowledge and assumptions about all the topics it brings to the fore: social divisions, the ontology of politics and risk, cultural transfer, and the ongoing public trial of sex. From theory to public education, from hardcore porn to dance and TikTok, a treasury of materials bespeaks the impact these struggles have made on our culture, as these essays and interviews rove gracefully but probingly through it. The specifics of language, national contexts, and the vexed positions of gay writing thread deftly and provocatively through these compelling texts. -- Jason Hartford, University of Dundee Bringing together new, cutting-edge research into cultural narratives and testimonies of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Loļc Bourdeaus and V. Hunter Cappss important collection Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture: Raw Matters is a timely, dynamic, and interdisciplinary exploration of what it means to study HIV/AIDS today, in a time when the current COVID-19 public health crisis seems to be [ reopening] an old wound in France, demanding that the traumas, histories and voices of HIV/AIDS past and present are heard, honoured and studied with renewed urgency. The book invites us to explore the specificity of the political, cultural, queer experience and legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis through introducing us to a compelling new conception of "rawness." This rawness seeks to conceptualise the ways in which unmitigated vulnerability and unprocessed trauma are expressed and witnessed in cultural productions stemming from the beginning of the crisis to its continuing shockwaves. This work offers rich concepts and frameworks with which to help us "to connect past and present, to continue to unearth voices, lived experiences, and lessons that can help us shape a better future." -- Benjamin Dalton, University of Birmingham
