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, Loïc Bourdeau’s and V. Hunter Capps’s 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

Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture: Raw Matters is an important intervention in HIV/AIDS studies in the French cultural context. Far from simply referring to unprotected sex, in this volume, ‘raw’ is a way of talking about wounds and emotions, writing and reading, risk and virality, present, past, and future. By revisiting the HIV/AIDS epidemic through those ‘raw’ lenses at a time when the epidemic has not yet reached its end and COVID-19 is raging, this volume forces us to rethink queerness, identity, subjectivity, and citizenship.

Matthieu Dupas, Northwestern University