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Crisis Infrastructures: AIDS Activism Meets Internet Regulation

Resource type
Date created
2020-04-01
Authors/Contributors
Abstract
This chapter analyses how AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya and his internet activist organization Critical Path leveraged its community-based internet infrastructure model to challenge online content regulations about sex in the United States in testimony against the 1996 Communications Decency ACT (CDA). The CDA and AIDS internet activism were intertwined, sociotechnical phenomena, caught up in the rapidly unfolding, neoliberal information environments of the 1990s. Through this case, growing moral panics over sexual expression online were articulated to HIV and related perceptions of risk. I argue that during the 1990s, cultural understandings of HIV were inseparable from attempts to define the place of sexuality online and regulate “appropriate” internet use. The internet as we know it today has been imagined and re-calibrated through AIDS. The “AIDS crisis,” as it was understood during this period by US judicial and legislative systems and the wider public, continues to reverberate in the ways online infrastructures both provide and limit access to information about sex.
Document
Identifier
ISBN: 9781478007777
Published as
McKinney, Cait. “Crisis Infrastructures: AIDS Activism Meets Internet Regulation.” In AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, 162–182. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.
Publication title
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises
Document title
Crisis Infrastructures: AIDS Activism Meets Internet Regulation
Editor
Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani
Date
2020
First page
162
Last page
182
Copyright statement
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Scholarly level
Peer reviewed?
Yes
Language
English
Member of collection

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