Memories, stories and languages of pain and struggle in the HIV/Aids Brazilian activism

Abstract

This article discusses issues that are approached and publicly presented by HIV/ Aids social activism in Brazil. Questions on memory and history of this social movement and civil society are present when the activism suffers with dilemmas and obstacles related to its social continuity and institutional maintenance. Therefore, events and celebrations have been organized and express a strong cultural language of emotions, materialized by the use of objects, posters, and photographs. Through an anthropological research based on ethnography and the interpretation of documents, I discuss how a politics of memory is created, the maintenance of a tradition of activist knowledge, and the production of some silences regarding the past, which has been somehow occulted and framed by a certain perspective on the history of Brazilian ONGs and their activisms.