What’s love got to do with it? Building and maintaining HIV-affected families through love, care, and activism in Edinburgh 1981-2016

This project explores how HIV-affected people built and maintained families in Edinburgh, influencing national and international policy and practice through daily acts of love, care, and activism between 1981-2016.

Adopting the broad understanding of ‘family’ deployed by queer scholars, it scrutinises how HIV- affected families of choice, origin, and necessity worked with – and included – communities of friends, activists, and health and social care practitioners, to meet the emotional, educational, and medical needs of the HIV-affected.

In doing so, the project will trouble and historicise the varied definitions of ‘love’, ‘care’, ‘activism’, and ‘family’ deployed by actors to interpret acts, objects, and spaces involved in building and maintaining HIV-affected families.

The key aims are to uncover how HIV-affected families’ needs were defined and met; to what extent meanings of ‘family’ and ‘activism’ were changed by the necessities of HIV-related care work; and what influence, if any, the experiences of HIV-affected families had on conceptions of reproductive politics and childcare.

The project draws new links between histories of family, reproduction, risk, pleasure, social care and activism, identifying new actors, networks, and objects, advancing voices which, while present in the archive, are muted in the current historiography.