In the late 1960s, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan popularized the phrase “global village,” which captured the growing perception that for many people, mass media and transportation technologies had effectively reduced the size of the globe, irrevocably altering their sense of where they lived. Asserted at the height of the Vietnam War, the idea that the wonders of technology could transform the planet into a cozy village offered a less paranoid vision of Americans’ place on spaceship earth than the images of secret invasion that had characterized Cold War ideology. Although the image of the global village ignored the political...

From the epidemic’s dawn, AIDS activists have been deeply aware of the ways in which the body is constituted through biomedicine and social science and painfully cognizant of how that body is policed through the public policies and health-education programs developed from these research disciplines. Nevertheless, bodies—we—are also desperately dependent on precisely these scientific institutions and practices for any hope of medical care, antidiscrimination statutes, or prevention programs. Thus, activists and cultural critics concerned with the epidemic are in the precarious situation of challenging the way AIDS is described and then policed while simultaneously inhabiting bodies constituted through...

In the late twentieth century, the meaning—or at least the face—of colonialism changed. Power no longer rested as obviously in the military primping and posturing of a small number of super nations. Though managed by the marginally international forces of the United Nations and militarism disguised as humanitarianism they represent, already-fragmented territories were torn apart by ethnic claims to nation status and by religious fundamentalist ambitions for theo-political rule. Multinational corporations and transnational trade pacts, though still largely controlled by long-enduring European and American powers, now dominate economies. A feral capitalism and the bloody wars within and between...

A deeply spatial understanding of disease echoes in the WHO’s division of the world into six administrative regions, a division that, as I will show, simultaneously naturalizes the designated units and largely cedes to individual nations political power within them. Because funds come from developed countries and—with the most delicate of strings—go to countries the West is interested in developing, the WHO continues to be in a tricky position: It must take care neither to offend the donor countries nor to make policies that are unpalatable to the client states. The WHO’s role in global management has become...

By 1992, there should have been little doubt that the original categories—indeed, the original framework—for understanding AIDS were no longer useful. What we needed was a radical breakthrough in thinking about the epidemic, perhaps some kind of postmodern research discipline that would resort neither to the palpable but corrupt geopolitical spatialization of tropical thinking, nor to the incorporeal temporalizing of epidemiology. We needed new concepts that would vivify the bodies that were not only geographically mobile but also sexually labile. We needed a way tofeelour bodies as the disrupters of vectors. Unfortunately, this did not happen....