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Rhetoric and Fictions of AIDS Discourses Have Impinged Particularly

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Rhetoric and Fictions of AIDS Discourses Have Impinged Particularly o I RHETORIC AND FIGTIONS OF AIDS MASTER OF ARTS (RESEARCH) THESIS RIKKI WILDE DISCIPLINE OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE JUNE 2OO5 for the award of any This work contains no material which has been accepted or other tertiary institution and, to the s no material previously published or due reference had been made in the text' , when deposited in the UniversitY tocopying. Signed Wilde) Date GONTENTS Acknowledgements l1 Abstract I Introduction 13 ChapterlNarrativesofTransgender,MimêsêsofHIV/AIDS the Psyche and cl.npter 2 Psychographies: 'written' Narratives of 51 neaãing the Maladies of the (Queer) Male Body 86 Chapter 3 The Rule of Blood 111 chapter 4 The Production and circulation of an AIDS Bestseller 133 Chapter 5 Death Lines 155 Conclusion 161 Bibliography Illustrations 49 Figure 1 Bunny Bed-hopping (Photo byMazz Image) 50 Figure 2 EncMichaels (Photo by Penny Taylor) Acknowledgements the writing of this I have received a greatdeal of support in many ways during Dr Catherine Driscoll thesis. I wish to thank my supervisòis, Dr Susan Hosking, colleagues. and Dr Mandy Treagus, and my family, friends and Stanton (1929- The thesis is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Margaret 2001.) Abstract perceptions of This thesis insists that it is rhetoric and fictions that construct that followed the HIV and the AIDS body. It examines cultural production of the identification and naming of the virus and attempts a queer reading significations of this cultural response to AID in ttre period from 1987 to 1995 and events st finds useful in this critique the critical approa Benjamin, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari and sometimes trow ttris rhetoric and these fictions interacted, supplemented sexual praxis' challenged aheady existing discourses of biomedicine, bodies and lntroduction By "rhetoric" I mean the art of persuasion, the persuasion of sexuality, being construct the persuaded by the flesh; but also the words of persuasion, the words that historical hysteria and panic of the 'gay disease' of AIDS. I am looking at a certain where AIDS moment and events stemming from that moment, chiefly in Australia, to and HIV infection were primarily perceived as a gay concern' I write 'moment' 'momentum' suggest the ephemerality of a period that has now passed and also the that the and intensity of the time. By using "fictions" in the title I wish to suggest to HIV and thesis will convey the postmodern conceit of multiplicity with regards AIDS, multiple narratives, invented, plural, verisimilitudes' The ,,AIDS" in the thesis title refers to a virus that, hnally, is a lie, a phenomenological' deconstructive agent, a critique, not material, rather apparent or of HIV This thesis insists that it is rhetoric and fictions that construct perceptions the and the AIDS body. The thesis examines cultural production that followed reading identification and the fraught process of naming the virus. I employ a queer in of the signihcations of this cultural response to the AIDS 'crisis', mainly material Australia, particularly in the period from 1987 to 1995, although I will use period from earlier periods to provide context to my argument and texts from a later period cultural that are the result of the earlier period. I chose to focus on the of most production from 1987 to 1995. This was the period when HIV and AIDS was 2 ,homosexualised' or queered. As Dennis Altman wrote in 1994: "Australia remalns one of about half a dozen countries in which the transmission of HIV remains mainly due to homosexual intercourse, and in which the toll of the epidemic is overwhelmingly experienced by the gay community'"l on queef The rhetoric and fictions of AIDS discourses have impinged particularly to be communities in Australia and elsewhere, and these communities demanded included in the formation of the cultural discourse 'about' AIDS' This thesis on cultural employs a variety of critical tools: Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin production, Derridean theories of indeterminability and aporia, and a consideration the AIDS of how these 'anti-concepts' may be applied to notions of transsexuality, melancholy virus, psychiatry and medicine. Also useful are post-Freudian ideas of queff structure' It and mourning. Overall, the thesis is formed by a post-identity and entrenched notions takes account of theories that have challenged commonsense have of identity and sexuality: theorists such as Hocquenghem, Butler and Sedgwick helped form mY arguments. have But it is Deleuzo-Guatarrian territorialisation and rhizomatics to which I repeatedly turned. Deleuze and Guattari's writings regarding the interconnecting mapping without lines, surfaces that seem to have no depth, bodies without ofgans' pertinent in tracing, becomings, and major and minor literatures, always were seeking to write of 'homosexuality' and the epidemic. Deleuze and Guatarri furnished an acute vocabulary and their ideas gave impetus to my argument' Leave Me this Way: Art t AltmarL D. "Psycho-Cultural Responses to AIDS," in Gott, T. (ed.) Don't 3 The final chapter of my thesis focuses particularly on the politics of death and lines grief. Indeed, those politics shadow all the chapters. For Deleuze and Guatarri, an infinity of death hold diverging series together and a line of death passes through of predicates. they see Deleuze and Guatarri write in Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) that a taboo' death as a line, an aporia, a metamorphosis, a crossing of boundaries, social a type of becoming and, paradoxically' an exhaustion: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, leads to the authentic character of an incorporeal transformation.... In effect, death is everylvhere' as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms and states, and as the conditional, even initiatory, even syrnbolic, through which a subject must pass, in order to change its form or state.2 or The AIDS body, the body afflicted by AIDS, is in this process of transformation flight. In their postulates of what they term "order-words" Deleuze and Guattari recycle they gloss Canetti's term, used in Crowds and Power; "enantio-morphosis", which in the Notes to A Thousønd Plateaus as "prohibited hansformations'"3 Deleuze and Guatarri have written: there are no causes and effects among bodies..' all bodies are causes----causes in relation to each other and for each other'..' Yet Australia, 1994' p'139' in rhe Age of AIDS, Canberra and Melbourne: National Gallery of , i,"l"rÏu, G. and Guatarri, F. A Thousand Plaleaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans' by Massumi, B. London: Athlone Press, 1988. p' 107' 4 what is more intimate or essential to bodies than events such as growing, becoming smaller, or being cut?a The order-word is already a death, a type of rigor mortis, encapsulated in language, it stops one in one's tracks, literally' Deleuze and Guatarri assert: "You are already dead when you receive the order- word... that man is dead."5 They apply aLelbnizian monadology when they write of the non-corporeal: It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body separates ancl distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the extremity of the body, is the non-corporeal attribute that limits and completes that body--death is the f,rgure'6 In other words, one of the significations of death is that, for a while at least,'it is an acknowledgement that a subject existed in an individual manifestation or body' Also, it is through death that a body reaches completion, not only in time but in case of space, and it is through death that its lines form an outline or shape. In the AIDS, the morphing is through the virus; it is taboo to morph in such a way and the acquisition of, or infection by the virus or even ultimately disappearing oI "de- ceasing" through AIDS is a transgression, a threat to a controlled, strictured 3 A Thousand Plaleaus, n' 17, P. 525 a A Thousand Plateaus.P.43. s A Thousand Plateaus. P. 107. u A Thousan complicated appetition", 2005,pp.66 Deleuze, G. 5 heteronormative society. It is an act of disobedience and defies the command or order-word. Although the perceived HIV epidemic among gay men was not contagious or infectious in the sense of the bubonic plague or polio, there were nevertheless strong metaphoric parallels or lines of connection with plague' Canetti makes some incisive points about plague. In his essay "Epidemics" in Crowds and power he uses the ancient Greek historian Thucydides' description of the plague as a Point of deParture: The element of contagion, which plays so large a part in an epidemic, has the effect of making people separate from each other. The safest thing is to keep away from everyone else, for anyone may have the infection on him.7 This is what happened in some respects in the case of HIV/AIDS hysteria, especially at cruising areas or beats. and Casual sex became much more anxiety-producing for the participants; saunas sex on the premises venues were attacked as sources of infection, and there were cries for them to be shut down, even though they provided free condoms. The ironic opposite effect was that HIV infection and AIDS made gay men a community as nevg¡ before, gave a new political impetus to gay consumef clone culture, through problematising excess, and instigated radical groups such as ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in the conservative 1980s. Dennis Altman has written p.215. 7 canetti, E. crowds and Power. Translated by Stewart, c. London: Gollancz, 1962' 6 on this issue, in AIDS and the New Puritanism. He makes the point that the AIDS that epidemic arrived after over a decade of gay community building and politics, so gay communities had aheady established a political and social structure from which to respond to the oncoming epidemic.s They worked in co-operation with government to challenge rhetoric prejudicial to the community and those infected with the virus or suffering from AIDS.
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