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 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

The way we've understood the 70s to date is from something like Randy Schultz's And the Band Played On that starts with the 1976 bicentennial as we are about to celebrate the 250th in an entirely different context in the States.

So you hear about gay liberation and gay men's sexual practice as the driving force of what becomes AIDS.

But the politics, the political economy of blood, the political economy of drug use is so fundamental in the 1970s.

And part of what we understand is when we focus on particularly gay male sex, we forget about everything else that was also happening.

So it's the first time that it's possible to sell your blood online.

So poor people who are able, the blood products industry is really revolutionized in the 1970s.

And so you're able, if you're poor and that's the only thing you can sell, you can sell your blood and your plasma.

You can pool blood products together to create different things.

And that's the piece about hemophiliacs.

It's also a time when people who are incarcerated are able to give blood.

I mean, there's just a whole set of things related to blood.

And then there's the reality that heroin drug use becomes quite substantial in the 1970s.

And there's some sense that men returning from the Vietnam War who have become addicted to using heroin or alcohol

Just changes in urban economies that make that kind of survival economy necessary.

So there are just a whole host of things happening to the blood supply.

So we talk about blood sisters.

They come out of a context where...

the meaning of blood was really shifting.

So I think there's a lot to be said for the 1970s and studying it.

And the reality is that we know that communities were developing survival strategies that predated safer sex, that predated even the blood sisters.

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