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In this article in the symposium on 25 Years at the Margins: The Global Politics of HIV/AIDS, the awareness of state responses to AIDS in the South is compared to the responses by industrialized countries during the first wave of the pandemic to argue that successful dissemination of retroviral therapy neglects the vital component of involving civil society. Accounting for government failure to adopt early & effective prevention programs is problematized in the case of France. A historical narrative traces the failure of the French AIDS policy in terms of capacity perceptions & misperceptions about the disease. The actions of President Mitterand & president of the French blood system Michel Garretta are contextualized in the global economic environment that was increasingly structured by market imperatives. The politics of misconception are traced to issues emerging from marginalized populations, the realization of AIDS as a blood-born pathogen, concern for blood supply safety, & hemophiliac exposure. The failure of advanced industrial democracies to respond quickly to HIV/AIDS pandemic is concluded to rest on perceptions of constraint & misperceptions that, across regions & time, clarify complex motivations that shape decisionmaking. References. J. Harwell

AbstractScholars consider the translatability and efficacy of "western" LGBT politics as they diffuse, but pay little attention to the role of its histories and cultures as geo-temporal phenomena. Focusing on Pride events, this article demonstrates how such oversights inhibit a full account of the widely diverse impacts of similar actions in different places. We explore the ways in which Pride events, as a mode of activism, go global and integrate in vastly different contexts: Serbia and Uganda. Paying particular attention to acts of violence and the instrumentalization of Pride as geopolitical, we argue that divergent outcomes connect to the diffusion of Pride as creative of geo-temporal dislocations of politics and history. Incorporating the concept of extraversion, we demonstrate that the intertwining of the domestic and international facilitates the transformation of politics in terms of foreseen outcomes and unintended consequences. Overall, we propose a framework that advances an understanding of homophobic and homophilic politics as instrumentalizations of geo-temporal dislocations that underpin the global fight for LGBT rights. As a challenge to the progress narrative nearly intrinsic to western international relations, this approach is useful to explore processes that shape other types of transnational politics, such as democracy, climate change, and peace movements.

While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Contributors theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a range of national contexts.