Charlie Bond

Charlie Bond is a PhD student at Concordia University's Social and Cultural Analysis program. He is interested in the relationship between capitalism and sexuality. His thesis, “Autumn in New York”, draws on archival material, economic history, queer history, urban geography, and Marxian value theory, in order to reconstruct a political economy of the New York AIDS crisis. Here, Charlie aims to show that the devastation of the AIDS crisis and simultaneous emergence of a consciously ‘queer’ sexuality may be read as a single reverberation of the City’s economic restructuring.

As part of this research project, Charlie is also interested in the City’s cultural production from the early 1970s to late 1990s. His key questions include: How did queer aesthetics mediate the AIDS crisis and primitive accumulation as two sides of a coin? To what extent did they stage the crisis as a class war with gays and lesbians on both sides? And what genres of non normative sexuality (from the “gay” to the “queer”), and in what media (from the AIDS memoir to popular cinema), did the crisis foreclose and pry open?

Charlie is a former fellow of Concordia’s Social Justice Centre, and delivered a public seminar, “The Political Economy of HIV: Capital, Sexuality and Mediation in New York City" in 2024. He was also a graduate student union delegate for the University’s Sociology and Anthropology Department from 2022-2025.