Professor Jennifer Breyer

speaker

344 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Professor Jennifer Breyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Lesbian Blood Sisters of the HIV Crisis · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

I'm well, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Well, it's a difficult time here in the States, I will say.

But the University of Illinois, Chicago is an amazing place and this city is...

It's a crossroads of many things and it's got a rich history of lesbian lives, to be perfectly honest.

So I'm excited to talk to you and to listen to what people have to say.

Well, there's a biological way to answer that question, a historical way to answer that question, a sociological, political way.

I'll take it from the historical side because I'm sure that there are people who can do a better job on the deep biological side.

At the most basic level, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is...

the virus that causes AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which is a constellation of illnesses and opportunistic infections that basically create in the human body

the inability to resist various kinds of infections and causes really dreadful consequences in the human body, different in people assigned female at birth than people assigned male at birth.

It is something that we now understand is acquired through blood and

So that means blood and blood products.

So semen, blood being shared in various ways, including blood donations and blood products, but also through intravenous drug use.

It's something that can move from pregnant woman to fetus.

Although, you know, that's an interesting story as well, how women have basically been at the forefront of helping us figure out how to stop that from happening and therefore stop it from happening across all humans.

But it is a virus that was discovered in the early 1980s.

AIDS as a syndrome, as a constellation of illnesses, was identified first.

in 1981, just in June of 1981.

But of course, it predated its existence, predated those early reports.

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