"Sex Nice But Di AIDS Ting"

A Black Transnational Ethnography of HIV/AIDS, Reproduction, & Dancehall in Neocolonial Jamaica

DR. JALLICIA ALICIA JOLLY

MARCH 30 @ 4:30 PM  | MAX KADE SEMINAR 329A

This talk frames Jallicia Jolly’s articulation of a Black transnational feminist ethnography of HIV/AIDS and reproduction. Jolly discusses how this methodological and epistemological practice displaces the dominant knowledge about Black women’s sexuality, young women’s reproductive capacities, and HIV and AIDS, thus rewriting colonial scripting of black female sexuality as well as humanitarian and biomedical portrayals of women's experiences. She explores dancehall - a soundtrack of fraught possibility of Black women’s erotic and political lives - as an extant arena through which young Jamaican women redefine historic racist and sexist stereotypes of urban working-class women as non-political actors, while contesting the heteronormative narratives of Black female pathology and the boundaries of exclusionary citizenship.  Drawing from an intersectional ethnography of Jamaica women’s grassroots HIV/AIDS organizing, this talk illustrates how women’s multi-  layered narratives and embodied experiences make way for alternative, expansive, and authentic visions of identity, politics, and community for multiply marginalized Caribbean
subjects existing at the margins.

dr. JALLICIA ALICIA JOLLY

Dr. Jallicia Jolly is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College.  A 2022 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow based at Yale University, Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women’s health, political leadership, and reproductive justice; the transnational politics of gender, structural racism, sexuality, class, and health; intersectionality and HIV/AIDS; and Black, Caribbean, and transnational feminisms. Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, under contract with the University of California Press, is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living with HIV that chronicles how the politics of HIV care and self-making meet in their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica.

Dr. Jolly connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders. She is appointed as a Visiting Research faculty by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at the Yale School of Public Health to the Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS). A public scholar committed to political action, Dr. Jolly co-leads Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts (BEJMA), a reproductive justice coalition that aims to advance maternal health equity in policy and to improve the health outcomes of Black and Brown birthing people. Her public writing, which merges her community-based work on black politics, women's health, and political leadership in the United States and the Caribbean, has appeared in The Washington Post/The Lily, USA Today, Jamaica Gleaner, Ms. Magazine, and Huffington Post. Dr. Jolly's work has been published in American Quarterly, The Lancet, Feminist Anthropology, Souls, and Journal of General Internal Medicine and has received support from the Ford Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the American Association of University Women, MIT, and Blue
Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.