Save the Date! “Illuminating Ill Erotics: An Evening of Song, Storytelling, and Liberated Futures in the HIV/AIDS Movement.”
Save the Date! The Boston Women’s Fund is proud to present “Illuminating Ill Erotics: An evening of Song, Storytelling, and Liberated Futures in the HIV/AIDS Movement.”
Join us on World AIDS Day, Tuesday, December 1, in Cambridge, MA, to celebrate Dr. Jallicia Jolly’s new book, Ill Erotics: Black Jamaican Women and Self-Making in Times of HIV/AIDS, an in-depth study of Black girls and women living with HIV in the Caribbean, and the indispensable role community-care and grassroots networks play in sustaining human well-being.
Together, we’ll honor the many women of the movement through songs, stories, and scholarship. Professor and beatboxer Chesney Snow will open the night accompanied by pianist AJ Shaw. Author Dr. Jallicia Jolly will share her journey to this work and insights from Ill Erotics, before joining Dr. Jo-Anna Rorie and Dr. Ndidimaka Amutah-Onukagha in a dynamic conversation about the HIV/AIDS and reproductive justice movements today. Renowned poet Staceyann Chin will close the evening with a spoken word performance. Book signing to follow.
Save the Date!
Tuesday, December 1, 2026
541 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139
5:30-8:30 pm
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*No one turned away for lack of funds.
More about Ill Erotics
Through nearly a decade of research with Black Jamaican women living with HIV, Ill Erotics reveals how, despite popular narratives declaring the “end of AIDS,” communities continue to confront illness, stigma, and inequality while also creating extraordinary forms of community care, pleasure, collective survival, and political action.
Black girls and women living with HIV are not simply surviving inequality — they are architects of life-affirming care and community-rooted support structures. Medicine alone cannot sustain human well-being. Communities and grassroots networks do, and these women’s organizing is proof. Ill Erotics is about whether a person living with HIV can imagine a future for herself after diagnosis. It is about the indispensable role community-care and grassroots networks play in sustaining human well-being. It is about asking ourselves whose experiences remain marginalized, whose labor made survival possible, and what forms of care and infrastructure are still needed.
