The Art of Remixing: Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro's “DiAna's Hair Ego REMIX”

DiAna’s Hair Ego REMIX grapples with this frustration, exhaustion, and despair through the art of remixing. By remixing I mean the recombination, reinterpretation, and reworking of the aesthetic forms, emotions, histories, and politics associated with the AIDS epidemic. One can see this remixing in the form of the film, which mixes footage from the original film with the new narrative. The film also remixes the negative emotions generated by the epidemic through its representations of collectivity, conviviality, and care in the salon, invoking the beauty shop’s historical role as a space of emotional support. Another way we can interpret the film’s remixing is in its staging of a conversation between a new generation of youth activists and an older generation of artists and activists. While DiAna DiAna and Dr. Gaddist embody a history of sustained grassroots movements against AIDS in black communities, the appearance of young black LGBT activists in the film demonstrates how sustained social movements must be remixed in order to confront the epidemic in the current historical context. As political scientist Cathy Cohen argues, “Black youth can help us remix our democratic principles and practices, recognizing that full membership and the participation of all must be the basis for American politics in the 21^st century.”³

In the face of a state government that has all but divested funds from public prevention efforts, a public health apparatus that has become more punitive than preventative, rapidly rising costs of pharmaceuticals, and precarious access to affordable care under the current administration, Diana’s Hair Ego REMIX offers us a fresh vision—a multilayered, intersectional, and malleable approach to ongoing struggles against AIDS. The film asks us to remember and to build on the legacy of black women’s labor, knowledge production, and creativity in the fight against AIDS, while asking us to consider what must be remixed in order to sustain local and global social movements against AIDS. Throughout the film, DiAna washes and styles Cheryl’s twists, Bambi’s short-cropped do, Bailey’s platinum tresses, and Stacy’s gold-tipped locs. With each wash and set, DiAna demonstrates that sustaining social movements requires artists and activists to make space for “other” bodies, stories, identities, and practices; and with each new encounter, possibilities for ending HIV/AIDS in black communities emerge.

¹ Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 73.

² South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, “An Epidemiological Profile of HIV and AIDS in South Carolina,” 2017.

³ Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 234.

Darius Bost is Assistant Professor of Sexuality Studies and Assistant Director of the Center for Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality at San Francisco State University. His research focuses in the areas of Black cultural studies, LGBT and queer studies, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, trauma studies, and HIV/AIDS. His book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press), is an interdisciplinary study of black gay cultural movements in Washington, D.C., and New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the President’s Office and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at San Francisco State University, the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences at Duke University, the Martin Duberman Visiting Scholars Program at the New York Public Library, and the Penn Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Related research has been published or is forthcoming in Journal of American History, Criticism, Journal of West Indian Literature, Occasion, and several edited collections.