From G.R.I.D. to AIDS &COVID-19 to Long-COVID: Naming and Defining Biological Threats

This article uses the history of the early U.S. case definition of AIDS to question the imperatives in the newly developed Long-COVID (LC) definition. Doing so allows us to think through the role of case definitions in producing meaning in our world and to consider what we can learn about the politics of knowledge creation. By examining the porous boundaries of identity, institutions, and AIDS and placing this history in relation to LC, I argue that the state is doing more than describing and diagnosing these institutional practices, but that hybrid identities are produced by the state through these practices like naming and defining. Comparing these two events in public health reveals the state to be a primary—perhaps the primary—agent in elaborating the contours of identity through disease. I employ an analytic framework based on the institutionalization of "identity stories" established by political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward to argue that the case definition is a central site where knowledge about disease and identity is built into the structure of political institutions. Identifying how this process happens within institutions provides important political lessons for our current moment and offers opportunities for resistance to health inequities.