Religion, AIDS, and American Culture by Brandon Cleworth A
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ASU Digital Repository Ambivalent Blood: Religion, AIDS, and American Culture by Brandon Cleworth A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved April 2012 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Tracy Fessenden, Chair Linell Cady Jacqueline Martinez ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY August 2012 ABSTRACT Ambivalent Blood examines the unsettled status of religious language in the semiotic construction of HIV/AIDS in America. Since public discourse about HIV/AIDS began in 1981, a variety of religious grammars have been formulated, often at cross-purposes, to assign meaning to the epidemic. The disease’s complex interaction with religion has been used to prophesize looming apocalypses, both religious and national, demand greater moral solicitude among the citizenry, forge political advantage within America’s partisan political landscape, mobilize empathy and compassion for those stricken by the disease, and construct existential meaning for those who have already been consigned to physical and social death. Several studies fruitfully have explored specific registers of religious discourse and the AIDS epidemic, particularly in regard to processes of social stigmatization and combating its very effects. However, assumptions about the secular aims of scientific inquiry as well as the presumably secular trajectory of American national culture have dampened a more robust consideration of religion within the history of HIV/AIDS. In most synoptic histories of AIDS, religion is constructed as either a wincing footnote to the Religious Right or as an occasional and bland example of salubrious Christian charity posed against the backdrop of disease and death. Ambivalent Blood seeks to extend such analysis beyond a digestible footnote by disinterring the often polysemous and ambivalent interaction of HIV/AIDS and religious discourses within American culture. Though not a historiographic work, the current project illuminates the complicated ways in which religious and HIV/AIDS discourses i coalesced around the very definition of America itself. Like the Cold War that preceded and the Global War on Terror that followed, the AIDS crisis precipitated significant and contested recourse to the religious imaginary in the effort to forge conceptions of Americanness and citizen belonging. ii DEDICATION The French performance artist Orlan made famous the dictum, “Remember the future!” Ambivalent Blood exists as a very small exercise in historical inquiry and cultural analysis that acknowledges that every present moment is an amalgam of past experience, immediate concern, and tentative longing for the future. The over determined rhetoric of death that rendered those with the HIV/AIDS – an accident of nature – as unnatural and unsuitable for life may seem, in hindsight, little more than an embarrassing artifact. But the past remains a predator, and it seems the rosy comforts of post-AIDS discourse promises almost as much as it forgets. Poet Tory Dent, a modern day Antigone, serves at the conclusion of this work as a counterfigure to the impulse to forget and compulsively paper over the exquisite vulnerabilities made so apparent in the first decades of the epidemic. Indeed, we would do well to remember from Sophocles’s Antigone that the challenges of one generation do not escape the next: ...as in ancient times I see the sorrow of the house, the living heirs of the old ancestral kings, piling on the sorrows of the dead and one generation cannot free the next –1 To that end, the present work is dedicated to all who have ventured forth to signify AIDS in ways which resist casting those with the disease as something other than objects of neglect. Consideration of their work, their struggle to represent HIV/AIDS, provides a framework for future generations needing to develop a praxis of resistance when the rights to be mourned, to be considered 1 Sophocles Antigone, lines 666-670. iii American and acknowledged as human, are withheld, as surely will occur again with plagues, biological, discursive, and otherwise, looming on the horizon. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A single page of acknowledgements hardly seems adequate to recognize the generosity of the many who helped bring Ambivalent Blood into existence. The need for economy combined with the desire to extol with due poetry those who have shown me such intellectual and emotional kindness over the past five years make this, perhaps, the most anxiety-inducing part of the project. Those who know they merit my most sincere thanks already know. But just in case… Ambivalent Blood would not have been possible without the guidance and endless patience of Tracy Fessenden, whose own insight, inimitable style, and penchant for intellectual bravery served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration that continues to drag my ideas out of the shade. Likewise, Linell Cady and Jacqueline Martinez provided encouragement, advice, and criticism that sharpened my writing and analysis alike. If only all graduate students were as lucky as to fall under their tutelage. Work on Ambivalent Blood required many long hours and regularly exacerbated what I have come to accept as a crankiness endemic to my nature. Jeremy Smith proved an indispensible partner on the home front, providing equal measures of sunshine, comfort, and latitude. Elizabeth Hufford continued in her long-standing roles of therapist, editor, and disciplinarian, and Ruth Callahan provided most necessary reminders of the great pleasures of a life of mind. v And, to the three Cleworths, I extend my endless gratitude. They have long been supportive, unfailingly, of all of my endeavors, irrespective of their merit. My debt to them remains, as ever, unrepayable. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1 Note from the Land of the Ill .............................................................. 1 Evasions and Post-AIDS Discourse ................................................... 4 Why AIDS? Why Now? .................................................................. 12 Ambivalent Blood ............................................................................. 15 Notes on Theoretical Dispensation .................................................. 21 Blueprints for Ambivalent Blood ..................................................... 26 CHAPTER ONE: AN ISSUE OF THE BLOOD ................................................... 41 Disenchanting AIDS ......................................................................... 43 AIDS: Apocalyptic or Else .............................................................. 46 Absenting Old Religion .................................................................... 49 Drawing Down the AIDS Apocalypse ............................................ 53 The Spiritualization of AIDS ........................................................... 61 Spirituality, AIDS, Nation ................................................................ 74 CHAPTER TWO: THE UNITED STATES OF AIDS .......................................... 79 Anomia, Miasma, AIDS ................................................................... 80 Pax Antibiotica ................................................................................. 88 Cold War Seige of the City on the Hill ............................................ 91 Reagan and the Great Communicative Silence ................................ 94 AIDS and Providential Freedom .................................................... 110 vii Page CHAPTER THREE: QUILTING AN AMERICAN IDOL ................................... 123 A Democratic Idol of Cross Stitch and Grommets ........................ 128 Between Sanctification and Sanitization ........................................ 131 Quilting a Negotiated Settlement ................................................... 139 CHAPTER FOUR: WE ARE ALL CITIZENS NOW .......................................... 155 The Jewish Citizen: Between Community and Assimilation ........ 159 The Mormon Citizen: A Painful Journey to Zion .......................... 172 The Limits of a Fabulous Gay Community ................................... 179 CHAPTER FIVE: THE SILENCE OF FAILED IMAGININGS .......................... 187 The Illusory Seropositive Woman as Frankenstein’s Monster ...... 189 Soldiering American Denials ......................................................... 196 The Breathtaking Indifference of Angels ....................................... 205 Wherein the Body Remains ............................................................ 216 EPILOGUE: ANTIGONE IN THE AGE OF AIDS .............................................. 219 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 231 viii INTRODUCTION Notes from the Land of the Ill The genesis of Ambivalent Blood is situated in a peculiar experience of illness and shame. Born in the late 1970’s, I represent the outer edge of the last American generation to be socialized into a world in which HIV/AIDS prefigured biological and national catastrophe. Though the biography of my adolescence is void of any intimate connection to the epidemic, I nonetheless recall being awash in vivid images of cadaverous patients, grave political speeches, temperate calls for tolerance and compassion, skeleton-clad protestors demanding action from City