The HIV/Aids Epidemic, Application Essay Example

In the contested space of culture, competing narratives and discourses constitute and engage in the politics of representation. This phenomenon is manifestly apparent in the case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as different cross-sections of society have politicized the representation of the epidemic and its many victims. Whether to stigmatize gays and reinforce entrenched homophobic bigotry, or to commemorate the lives of loved ones lost, the narratives that have been woven about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its victims are thoroughly political, and exist for the political purpose of definition through narrative representation.

As Couser explains, since the epidemic AIDS has been identified with evil, and its victims stigmatized accordingly (81). However, clinically speaking the disease is much more complex: HIV does not affect all people, everywhere, in the same way, and even what it means to be clinically diagnosed with AIDS has been subject to change (82). Moreover, the clinical progression of the disease is not necessarily as sequential and universal as has often been believed (82). In fact, depending on the circumstances, Couser explains, “some cases present an element of election; that is, patients may be told they ‘qualify’ for a diagnosis” (82). Despite the rather more complex clinical reality, the virulence of the initial outbreak contributed to a popular misconception of the disease as a sure death sentence (Couser 83).

This is the first major narrative which must be engaged with in the analysis of the politics of representation of HIV/AIDS: the narrative of HIV/AIDS which stigmatizes those afflicted with the disease, and uses the occurrence of the disease to reinforce bigotry and stereotypes regarding gays, the demographic that was by far the hardest-hit when the epidemic broke out in the 1980s (Couser 81, 84). In fact, the disease has consistently been represented as a kind of “gay disease”: it was even called gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) due to it being diagnosed first in that demographic (84). Of course, HIV/AIDS is also associated with intravenous drug use, since it can be spread by needle-sharing as well, and this has contributed to further stigmatization of HIV-positive people (84-85).

A seminal characteristic of this narrative, then, is stigma. Who gets HIV? Gays and drug users, both groups that were deeply stigmatized and marginalized by mainstream, “respectable” society in the world of the 1980s when the HIV epidemic broke out (Couser 84-85). What does it mean to be diagnosed as HIV-positive? It means that one ‘has AIDS’, and is therefore living under sentence of death: one is sick, and will certainly not get better (85). As of course is widely known, to some degree this narrative has begun to erode in more recent years, due to advances in antiretrovirals, but the stigma remains potent.

In fact, the stigma can override even the cultural conception of sickness, in those cases wherein the individual has contracted HIV as a result of behavior or even characteristics that are perceived by society as, again, being somehow “deviant” (Couser 85). The key cases in point are, respectively, intravenous drug use and sexual activity, whether ‘promiscuous’ heterosexual activity or any kind of homosexual activity: in such cases, the individual is treated as, fundamentally, a criminal or deviant (85). And what is a ‘deviant’, if not a constructed category articulated in opposition to a normative? The intravenous drug user, the gay man, and sometimes the ‘promiscuous’ straight man or woman, all of these are stigmatized in relation to the ‘respectable’, middle-class, usually white, straight person (87). In fact, the disease has been so thoroughly identified with homosexuality that a diagnosis in a young man hitherto regarded as straight has often been enough to ‘brand’ him with the much-stigmatized label of gay, thereby contributing further to the marginalization of HIV-positive people through rampant homophobic bigotry (87).

The lurid, sexual aspect of this stigmatizing narrative may especially be seen in some of the more noxious and even patently racist myths about the (purported) origins of HIV in Africa, the putative “Dark Continent”: while that is in fact where the disease originated, the myth-making process has conjured up absurd scenarios about “’tribal rituals involving the splashing of monkey blood over human genital organs to enhance sexual performance or sexual intercourse with monkey as the possible route’” (Schoub, qtd. in Couser 86). From all of this, it is not only possible but in fact quite easy to speak of an anthropological semiotics of HIV/AIDS: in the myth-making of the stigmatizing narrative, it originated in the “Dark Continent” through the depraved, lurid, and backwards rituals and sexual practices of benighted (black) natives, and was subsequently spread in the United States through the deviant subcultures of gay men and intravenous drug users, respectively—though these two categories might well be thought of as overlapping. All of these elements have opposite numbers: black, African ‘natives’ steeped in putative primitiveness versus ‘civilized’ white Westerners; intravenous drug users and gay men versus sober, clean, respectably middle-class straight men and women.

From this analysis the function of these semiotic representations could not be any clearer: they exist for the purpose of marginalizing ‘the Other’ (speaking in anthropological terms), and reifying the boundaries of group identity for mainstream society. This in turn explains much about the photographic representations of HIV/AIDS patients in the CBS Sixty Minutes portrait gallery analyzed by Crimp in 1992, which tended to focus on physical disfigurements suffered as a result of the disease (Couser 88). And, too, the representations tended to feature HIV/AIDS patients dying in their beds alone, rather than surrounded by loved ones (88). The purpose of that narrative was to make HIV/AIDS patients seem both hopeless and pitiable (88).

Of course, this is not the only narrative of HIV/AIDS and those afflicted with it. Culture is generally a contested space of competing narratives, at least when identity is at stake, and so too it is with HIV/AIDS. As Sturken so brilliantly explains, there is a far more sympathetic narrative of HIV/AIDS: the narrative told by loved ones, and dramatically memorialized in the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (183). The AIDS Quilt is immense, with “more than 40,000 panels from twenty-nine countries”, and has been seen by over five million people (183). The materials used to create the panels are diverse, but all are symbols meant to honor the lives and memories of loved ones through “pictures, memorabilia, symbols, colors, messages” (183). The AIDS Memorial Quilt is comparable to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in that it uses representation to attempt to bring people together on the basis of common loss, but it is quite radically innovative in how it commemorates loss and memory with memorabilia, in a format created by many different individuals (184).

Fittingly, this sympathetic narrative of the AIDS Memorial Quilt has its own origin story for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one that begins in the Castro, an iconic gay district in San Francisco (Sturken 185). This is a classic case of symbolic representation: the Castro is famous for its culture among gay communities throughout the United States, and it has been severely ravaged by the epidemic (185). Moreover, the idea for the project originated in 1985, on the anniversary of a very significant loss for the gay community in the Castro: “the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, an openly gay politician” (185). Thus, the tragic deaths of Moscone and Milk served as the symbolic touchstone that brought together activists to begin to commemorate their loved ones through the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the common thread being loss, and commemoration of the memories of those lost.

From this comes a distinctly different, far more humanizing, narrative of HIV/AIDS and its victims: a narrative of unique lives lived, of loved ones lost and remembered. The act of naming the dead is a key part of the politics of representation for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and, as with so much else in politics, it is highly contentious: family members, in particular, have opposed the use of their loved ones’ names, for fear that it would reveal a gay identity, for all that the quilt is intended to honor all those who have died of the disease (Sturken 186-187). Fundamentally, every panel is a testament to a life lived: it represents the lost loved one as the panel-maker(s) wish to remember them (188). The panels tell stories as diverse as those of the people they represent: stories of love and loss, triumph and tragedy, wisdom and even of great folly. All, however, serve the purpose of humanizing those lost to the disease: they cannot be reduced to stigmatized others if their personal, unique identities are reclaimed and asserted. And that, fundamentally, is the most profound political statement of all.

HIV/AIDS is a textbook example of the power of the politics of representation. In the contested space of culture, culture-as-text, two great narratives have competed for the right to define the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the many lives it has claimed. The first and most notorious is the stigmatizing narrative, the narrative of HIV-positive people as AIDS-afflicted and therefore consigned to a death sentence, and especially of AIDS patients as deviants. This narrative marginalizes intravenous drug users and gays, in particular, through a semiotics that opposes them to ‘respectable’, mainstream society. The other narrative, represented by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, is a sympathetic narrative, one that aims to reclaim and commemorate the unique, individual human lives lost to the disease. Constructed by loved ones, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is a highly symbolic political narrative, one that represents the identities of those lost and thus puts many human faces on the tragedy.

Works Cited

Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Print.