Jallicia Jolly in Person

Join us on December 2 at 7 PM as Jallicia Jolly shares her new book, Ill Erotics. She will be joined in conversation by Loretta Ross.
About this Event

About the Book

The fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the COVID-19 outbreak, and landmark struggles for reproductive justice has illuminated interconnected health inequities faced by Black women globally. As the first book-length ethnographic study to focus on Black girls and women living with HIV in the Anglophone Caribbean, Ill Erotics shows how women’s everyday lives contrast with widely circulated “end of AIDS crisis” narratives that equate biomedical progres with the end of the epidemic and prioritize individual responsibility for HIV self-management. Jallicia Jolly chronicles how these women navigate the contradictory interventions of the state, biomedicine, humanitarianism, and HIV/AIDS organizations. She argues that the grassroots practice of care enables a Black feminist infrastructure that centers interdependence, sexual agency, and political mobilization while repurposing discourses of shame, isolation, and contagion as ill erotics.

About the Author

Jallicia Jolly is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and American Studies at Amherst College. She is founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective, an interdisciplinary medical humanities lab.

About Loretta Ross

Loretta J. Ross is an activist, professor, and public intellectual. In her five decades in the human rights movement, she’s deprogramed white supremacists, taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism, and, as National Co-Director, organized the second-largest march on Washington (in April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., surpassed in size only by the 2017 Women’s March). 

A cofounder of the National Center for Human Rights Education and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, her many accolades and honors include a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2024 induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Today, Ross is an associate professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is the founder of LoRossta Consulting, with which she runs “Calling In” training sessions online and for organizations around the country.