Gallery Talk: (Un)masking Health

Join faculty curator Ivan Bujan, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University, as he discusses notions of health in relation to exclusionary ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, ability and class. In addition to scrutinizing notions of what a healthy body is — and according to whom — his Teaching Gallery installation, (Un)masking Health: Counter Perspectives, also invites us to reconsider the role that historical and contemporary grassroots movements, including the ongoing AIDS movement and the Movement for Black Lives, have had in connecting issues of health and social justice.

Ivan Bujan is a performance studies scholar working at the intersections of critical gender, race and sexuality studies; queer and trans of color critique; and contemporary visual cultures and performance; and he is deeply invested in creating publicly engaged scholarship on social justice and disparities in health. Bujan’s in-progress book manuscript highlights strategies queer of color artists have utilized to circumvent white supremacy, cis-masculinity, ableism and systemic racism in the cultural history of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. The project centers a seldom studied domain of work related to AIDS, utilizing anti-HIV drug regimens and prevention methods as key visual motifs and responding to the contested pharmaceutical politics of the late 1980s onward. Bujan’s research appears in Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), (Un)Desiring Whiteness: (Un)Doing Sexual Racism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture and Theatre Journal.