Jih-Fei Cheng
Scripps College, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Faculty Member
- Critical Theory, Media Studies, Visual Culture, Performance Studies, American Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and 27 moreEthnic Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Women of Color Feminism, Queer of Color Critique, Transpacific Studies, 'Decolonization' and the politics of settler state/Indigenous relations, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Digital Archives, Pornography Studies, Migrant and Diasporic Literature, Amerindian Studies, Pornography, Neoliberalism, Queer Theory, Cultural Memory, New Queer Cinema, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, Software, Popular Culture, Feminist Theory, History of Slavery, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Historical Materialismedit
- Jih-Fei Cheng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College.... moreJih-Fei Cheng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College. He holds a B.A. in Communication with minors in Chinese Studies and General/World Literatures from the University of California, San Diego; an M.A. in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity, with a certificate in Visual Studies, from the University of Southern California. From 2010-2013, Cheng served as the managing editor for American Quarterly, the official publication of the American Studies Association. Previously, he worked in HIV/AIDS social services, managed a university cultural center, has been involved in arts and media production and curation, and has participated as a board or steering committee member for various queer and trans of color community-based organizations in Los Angeles and New York City, such as the Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment! (FIERCE!). His organizing work has addressed the issues of queer and transgender health, immigration, gentrification and youth homelessness, police harassment and brutality, and prison abolition.
Cheng’s doctoral dissertation, “AIDS and its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination,” examined how experimental videos produced by AIDS activists during the earlier years of the U.S. AIDS crisis (1980s to mid-1990s) continue to politically intervene into contemporary popular media and social movements through their adaptations in recent AIDS activist documentary films, New Queer Cinema, and online HIV prevention campaigns.edit
Publication around the exhibition Candice Lin: A Hard White Body/Un corps blanc exquis, Betonsalon, winter 2017, co-curated by Lucas Morin and Lotte Arndt
Research Interests:
Interchange: hiv/aids and U.S. History Emerging in the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids) ravaged minori-tized communities across the country and in the process transformed the United States. In this " Interchange, " the... more
Interchange: hiv/aids and U.S. History Emerging in the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids) ravaged minori-tized communities across the country and in the process transformed the United States. In this " Interchange, " the writers focus primarily on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) communities and communities of color, groups that make up the majority of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) in the United States, as a way to explore social, cultural, and political battles over recognizing the significance of aids and for access to treatment and prevention. The epidemic, and those affected by it, transformed public discussion of sexuality and race, poverty, and public health. But despite those radical changes, hiv/aids has rarely been included in the history of the post-1960s era. Working with Jennifer Brier, the JAH brought together nine scholars to discuss how the history of hiv/aids intersects with the history of the United States. Participants engaged in a far-ranging conversation that interweaves histories of sexuality, race, gender, medicine, social activism, and media, and explores how hiv/aids has been addressed, and ignored, in historical scholarship of the late twentieth century. As the first feature-length piece dedicated to the history of hiv/aids published by the Journal, this " Interchange " is able to delve deeply into many critical aspects of the history of hiv/aids but misses many others. The JAH and all the contributors hope this piece sparks and sustains new historical research across the many axes of the field of U.S. history. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for sharing their thoughts on this subject.
Research Interests: HIV/AIDS and US History
Emerging in the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) ravaged minoritized communities across the country and in the process transformed the United States. In this “Interchange,” the writers focus primarily on lesbian, gay,... more
Emerging in the 1980s, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) ravaged minoritized communities across the country and in the process transformed the United States. In this “Interchange,” the writers focus primarily on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and communities of color, groups that make up the majority of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the United States, as a way to explore social, cultural, and political battles over recognizing the significance of AIDS and for access to treatment and prevention. The epidemic, and those affected by it, transformed public discussion of sexuality and race, poverty, and public health. But despite those radical changes, HIV/AIDS has rarely been included in the history of the post-1960s era.
Working with Jennifer Brier, the JAH brought together nine scholars to discuss how the history of HIV/AIDS intersects with the history of the United States. Participants engaged in a far-ranging conversation that interweaves histories of sexuality, race, gender, medicine, social activism, and media, and explores how HIV/AIDS has been addressed, and ignored, in historical scholarship of the late twentieth century. As the first feature-length piece dedicated to the history of HIV/AIDS published by the Journal, this “Interchange” is able to delve deeply into many critical aspects of the history of HIV/AIDS but misses many others. The JAH and all the contributors hope this piece sparks and sustains new historical research across the many axes of the field of U.S. history. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for sharing their thoughts on this subject.
JONATHAN BELL is a professor of U.S. history at University College London. He is the author of The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (2004) and California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (2012). His current project, “Unhealthy Bodies: Health Care and the Rights Revolutions since the Sixties,” examines civil rights activism and health care politics to explore the sexual and gender dynamics of U.S. health care. Readers may contact Bell at jonathan.bell@ucl.ac.uk.
DARIUS BOST is an assistant professor of sexuality studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the forthcoming Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. He is the coeditor of a special issue in the Black Scholar titled “Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability.” Readers may contact Bost at dbost@sfsu.edu.
JENNIFER BRIER is an associate professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (2009) and the curator of “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture,” a traveling exhibition for the National Library of Medicine. She currently directs a public history project on HIV/AIDS called “I'm Still Surviving: A Women's History of HIV/AIDS in the United States.” Brier was the guest editor for this Interchange. Readers may contact Brier at jbrier@uic.edu.
JULIO CAPÓ JR. is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017). He is currently writing a book that places the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in the long history of violence, erasure, and displacement of queer Latina/o/x communites. Readers may contact Capó at capo@history.umass.edu.
JIH-FEI CHENG is an assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He is working on a book tentatively titled “AIDS and Its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination.” He worked in HIV/AIDS social services and was a board member of Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment. Readers may contact Cheng at jcheng@scrippscollege.edu.
DANIEL M. FOX is the president emeritus of the Milbank Memorial Fund. He is the author of Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy (1993) and The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States (2010), the coeditor of AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (1992). He has served in three federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services. Readers may contact Fox at dmfox@milbank.org.
CHRISTINA HANHARDT is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013). Her current project looks at the historical relationship between sexuality-based social movements and antipoverty movements, and examines in particular how a wide range of activists have taken up, and shaped, the strategy of “harm reduction” most associated with public health advocacy. Readers may contact Hanhardt at hanhardt@umd.edu.
EMILY K. HOBSON is an assistant professor of history and in the program in Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and is currently working on a second book that explores the connection between AIDS activism and prison radicalism in the 1980s and 1990s. She is on the governing board of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History. Readers may contact Hobson at ehobson@unr.edu.
DAN ROYLES is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. He is the author of the forthcoming book To Make the Wounded Whole: The Political Culture of African American AIDS Activism. He is currently working on an oral history of African American AIDS activists and is building an online archive of materials relating to HIV/AIDS in black communities. He is the book review editor for the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History newsletter and is on the editorial board for OutHistory. Readers may contact Royles at droyles@fiu.edu.
Working with Jennifer Brier, the JAH brought together nine scholars to discuss how the history of HIV/AIDS intersects with the history of the United States. Participants engaged in a far-ranging conversation that interweaves histories of sexuality, race, gender, medicine, social activism, and media, and explores how HIV/AIDS has been addressed, and ignored, in historical scholarship of the late twentieth century. As the first feature-length piece dedicated to the history of HIV/AIDS published by the Journal, this “Interchange” is able to delve deeply into many critical aspects of the history of HIV/AIDS but misses many others. The JAH and all the contributors hope this piece sparks and sustains new historical research across the many axes of the field of U.S. history. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for sharing their thoughts on this subject.
JONATHAN BELL is a professor of U.S. history at University College London. He is the author of The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (2004) and California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (2012). His current project, “Unhealthy Bodies: Health Care and the Rights Revolutions since the Sixties,” examines civil rights activism and health care politics to explore the sexual and gender dynamics of U.S. health care. Readers may contact Bell at jonathan.bell@ucl.ac.uk.
DARIUS BOST is an assistant professor of sexuality studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the forthcoming Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. He is the coeditor of a special issue in the Black Scholar titled “Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability.” Readers may contact Bost at dbost@sfsu.edu.
JENNIFER BRIER is an associate professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (2009) and the curator of “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture,” a traveling exhibition for the National Library of Medicine. She currently directs a public history project on HIV/AIDS called “I'm Still Surviving: A Women's History of HIV/AIDS in the United States.” Brier was the guest editor for this Interchange. Readers may contact Brier at jbrier@uic.edu.
JULIO CAPÓ JR. is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017). He is currently writing a book that places the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in the long history of violence, erasure, and displacement of queer Latina/o/x communites. Readers may contact Capó at capo@history.umass.edu.
JIH-FEI CHENG is an assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He is working on a book tentatively titled “AIDS and Its Afterlives: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination.” He worked in HIV/AIDS social services and was a board member of Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment. Readers may contact Cheng at jcheng@scrippscollege.edu.
DANIEL M. FOX is the president emeritus of the Milbank Memorial Fund. He is the author of Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy (1993) and The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States (2010), the coeditor of AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (1992). He has served in three federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services. Readers may contact Fox at dmfox@milbank.org.
CHRISTINA HANHARDT is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013). Her current project looks at the historical relationship between sexuality-based social movements and antipoverty movements, and examines in particular how a wide range of activists have taken up, and shaped, the strategy of “harm reduction” most associated with public health advocacy. Readers may contact Hanhardt at hanhardt@umd.edu.
EMILY K. HOBSON is an assistant professor of history and in the program in Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and is currently working on a second book that explores the connection between AIDS activism and prison radicalism in the 1980s and 1990s. She is on the governing board of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History. Readers may contact Hobson at ehobson@unr.edu.
DAN ROYLES is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. He is the author of the forthcoming book To Make the Wounded Whole: The Political Culture of African American AIDS Activism. He is currently working on an oral history of African American AIDS activists and is building an online archive of materials relating to HIV/AIDS in black communities. He is the book review editor for the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender History newsletter and is on the editorial board for OutHistory. Readers may contact Royles at droyles@fiu.edu.
What is “contagion”? What scientific, linguistic, cultural, visual, aesthetic, and affective cues imbue the concept with meaning and force? A roundtable discussion with artist Candice Lin and scholars Mel Y. Chen and Jih-Fei Cheng.
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Ethnic Studies, Comparative Literature, Queer Studies, Media Studies, and 18 moreLanguages and Linguistics, Literature, Contemporary Art, Queer Theory, Sexuality, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Visual Arts, 'Decolonization' and the politics of settler state/Indigenous relations, Settler Colonial Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Animacy, Virus, Settler colonialism, Contagion, Contagion Theory, and Science and Technology Studies
Recent popular films have reconstructed the history of AIDS activism to suggest that the global AIDS crisis was fought against and won by white men in the United States seeking biomedical interventions. This massive misconstrual dismisses... more
Recent popular films have reconstructed the history of AIDS activism to suggest that the global AIDS crisis was fought against and won by white men in the United States seeking biomedical interventions. This massive misconstrual dismisses the momentous and ongoing contributions of women and queer of color AIDS activists. It severely misrepresents the politics of many of the white men involved. Furthermore, it obscures the ongoing pandemic as it continues to disproportionately affect women and people of color and those living in the global south. This article explores the alternative creative and political strategies for survival employed by feminist and queer of color video collectives during the emergence of the U.S. AIDS crisis (1980s and early-1990s). It demonstrates how the footage generated by these artist-activists invented new political imaginations and representations of life that anticipate and challenge the mainstreaming and commercialization of AIDS representations in today’s popular films like How to Survive a Plague (2012) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013). By tracing the images of women and queers of color that appear momentarily in the feature-length documentary film, How to Survive a Plague, this article theorizes how queer of color AIDS images attain “afterlives” through their adaptation and circulation in contemporary popular media. Faced with the massive loss of people, especially women and people of color, feminist and queer of color video activist collectives innovated upon the tactics for representing AIDS to confront the regimes of neoliberalism and securitization that forged their precarious conditions. Feminist and queer of color AIDS video artist-activists cared for the bodies and the images of those who were most vulnerable to the crisis not simply to prolong life—they anticipated that these videos and images would return as the afterlives of those who might come to pass.
This article traces the earliest identified recorded descriptor for viral infection: the racialized Spanish expression "el tabaco se ha mulato" ("the tobacco has become mulatto"). The phrase appears in the late nineteenth-century travel... more
This article traces the earliest identified recorded descriptor for viral infection: the racialized Spanish expression "el tabaco se ha mulato" ("the tobacco has become mulatto"). The phrase appears in the late nineteenth-century travel writing of French colonial scientist Jules Crevaux, written as he journeyed through post-Spanish Independence Colombia and observed the demise of the once-thriving tobacco industry. I theorize the literary translations and visualizations, or what I call "visual translations," of the phrase across scientific and historical texts that cite Crevaux to track the refraction of racial, gender, and sexual discourses in virology. I argue that the phrase refers to the historically dispossessed Indigenous and Black subjects of the nascent Colombian republic and their resistance to subjection when forced to work the tobacco fields. The article historicizes virus discovery at the juncture between science, nation-building, global industrialization, and the disciplining of race and sex under the long shadow of Euro-American empire. Drawing upon Ed Cohen's concept of "viral paradox," Nayan Shah's notion of "strangerhood," and Mel Y. Chen's framework for thinking about "queer animacies," I deconstruct the visual, conceptual, and etymological roots of the phrase "el tabaco se ha mulato" to argue that the expression renders the virus as both "queer" and "strange" to the nation. The virus signifies the mulato subject as a stubborn challenge to racial hierarchies and to the host-guest-parasite relation, both of which are foundational to the social organization of the nation and polis. This signification insistently refuses the human/non-human binary that undergirds racial regimes and biological conceptions of life. In turn, I expand historical thinking about race, submit that pandemics result from global industrial resource extraction rather than merely poor hygiene, and offer a framework for "queer decolonizing."
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Communication, Social Networks, Research Methodology, Mental Health, Depression, and 23 moreSocial Problems, Behavior, HIV and AIDS education, Migration, Prejudice, Family, Developing Countries, Social Support, Population Dynamics, Quantitative Research, Risk Taking, Health, Pacific Islands, Population, Humans, Asia, Male, Gay men, Depressive Disorder, Developed Countries, Adult, Public health systems and services research, and Friends
Research Interests:
For the 28th annual Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS presented COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists—Juanita Mohammed, Ray Navarro (1964–1990), Nelson Sullivan... more
For the 28th annual Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS presented COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists—Juanita Mohammed, Ray Navarro (1964–1990), Nelson Sullivan (1948–1989), the Southern AIDS Living Quilt, James Wentzy, Carol Leigh aka Scarlot Harlot, Luna Luis Ortiz, Mark S. King, and Justin B. Terry-Smith—who live with their cameras as one way to manage, reflect upon, and change how they are deeply affected by HIV/AIDS.
Jih-Fei Cheng, assistant professor in the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, introduced the COMPULSIVE PRACTICE screening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles on December 4, 2016. This is a version of his introduction.
Jih-Fei Cheng, assistant professor in the Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, introduced the COMPULSIVE PRACTICE screening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles on December 4, 2016. This is a version of his introduction.