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MarvinBellSecondEssay 4 - 26 May 2022 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | On Losing Paul Farmer
-- By MarvinBell - 26 Apr 2022 | |
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< | The Start | >
> | The Start | | | To say that HIV has always played a role in my life would be a gross understatement. When I was five or six years old and living in Jamaica, I watched a close family friend of mine, whom I affectionately referred to as “cuz” succumb to an illness that my community refused to name. It was not until I came of age, moved to America, and had long since forgotten what “cuz” looked like that I learned that she had died from AIDS. Two years into my professional dance and college career in D.C., my friend succumbed to AIDS. A few months after his funeral, my closest friend revealed that he had contracted HIV. Around this very same time, the CDC disclosed a study that found that if current HIV diagnoses rates persist, about 1 in 2 black men who have sex with men (MSM) in the United States will be diagnosed with HIV. While recovering from my friend's death and burdened by the thought of losing another, I felt mobilized to conceptualize what was happening around me. A part of me knew that my friend and cuz’s death and my other friend’s diagnosis were not by chance – an even larger part of me knew that there was a way to understand what was happening. In the depths of my confusion and sadness, I found Paul Farmer. | |
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< | What Farmer Meant to Me | >
> | What Farmer Meant to Me | | | For physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer, every ill person seemed to be a potential patient and every healthy person a potential pupil. “Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.” The duty of physicians – “the attorneys of the poor” – is therefore to solve the “social problems experienced by the poor.” Despite not being called to practice medicine, I desperately wanted to rise to the challenge Farmer issued “healthy person[s].” There was a way, I thought, that some of us outside of the medical field could work to ensure the “health of the community.” Reading Farmer’s words at that point in my life turned my apathy into passion. And while there was very little that I could do to change the realities of those in my life who either contracted HIV or succumbed to AIDS, I knew that there was a way to add to a narrative around HIV/AIDS that drew attention from insufficient proximal explanations for higher HIV/AIDS risks among Black people and to the larger structural forces that conferred heightened vulnerability.
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< | To Jackson | >
> | To Jackson | | | Between May 2018 and September 2018, I collected the oral histories of some of the queer men of Jackson, Mississippi who were either living with HIV or AIDS or “at high risk” of contracting the virus. These oral histories allowed for a reflexivity that other methodological approaches did not. They gave the men I spoke with access to an avenue to verbalize those often unspoken and unspeakable elements of their social worlds that impacted them. I then situated these experiences in a biosocial context, attune to the fact nothing short of a biosocial contextualization would be insufficient to capture the multiplicity of factors that conferred onto them heightened vulnerability. Such biosocial analyses, Paul Farmer, suggested, must draw freely on clinical medicine and social theory; they must link epidemiology to history, ethnography, and political economy. The inequalities of outcome that Farmer describes are, more than anything else, biological reflections of social fault lines. His conceptualization of structural violence deepened my understanding of what was unfolding in Jackson and what was occurring in my life. The populations vulnerable to HIV transmissions are those captured within forms of social exclusion, abandonment, and violence. | | | - Rubí
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Rubi is right in all she says about the power of the draft.
Farmer lived an immense life, measured by the number of lives he changed. This is another powerful measure, more meaningful than fortune, certainly, to me: a form in which I hope as a teacher and a lawyer to aspire. A large life well lived leaves a large emptiness when it ends. Into that, other lives grow, including yours.
You work economically as well as powerfully. Through Farmer you can show th e lines between medicine and law, and medicine and anthropology. With a few more sentences you could close the triangle, by thinking a bit about your connection sides, anthropology and law It's the tacking back and forth between those two sensibilities, so well described by Clifford Geertz in the introduction to his Storrs Lectures, Local Knowledge that would get you there. Economical as you are, you can trim still more to make the space for what would be necessary.
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