Author Description

This book uses an ethnographic study of one gay community's responses to AIDS to illustrate a radical democratic understanding of citizenship in contemporary society. Analyzing specific forms of AIDS organizing and activism in Vancouver - from ACT UP to visiting buddy programs - Brown explores the alternative spaces of political action that have formed in locations where state, civil society, and family overlap. Instead of the traditional view of citizenship as a formal, unchanging relationship between individual and state, he proposes that citizenship is more productively discerned in everyday acts and in the actual places where we live our lives. An important contribution to queer theory and theories of radical democracy, the book brings abstract concepts down to earth with its nuanced portrait of the survival strategies of a community under siege.