Abstract
<jats:p> <jats:italic>The Specter of AIDS</jats:italic> is a transdisciplinary text originally written in 1980s Brasil in a time of pandemic emergency. It situates how HIV/AIDS reconfigured intimacy, sexuality, and power while also providing a minoritarian theory of desire lived by dissident sexualities in 1980s Latin America. </jats:p> <jats:p>Perlongher’s paper exposes a new barometer of life undergirded by medico-scientific reason, religious ideology, and morality — in other words, a re-actualization and intensification of normative reason. In nuanced prose combined with wit, rigorous scholarship, political alertness, and poetics, Perlongher delineates how HIV/AIDS serves as a blueprint for how viral threats shed light on the inequitable unevenness of this world.</jats:p> <jats:p>Written in Portuguese in 1987 and then published in Spanish in 1988, this translation offers an un/timely reading for the 21st century as it shows how new contaminants threaten national public health’s paradigms of gendered and racialized structures: their borders, bodies, and good comportment.</jats:p>