Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2010 Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease Marty Melissa Fink The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2168 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Forget Burial Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease by Marty (Melissa) Fink A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2010 ii © 2010 MARTY MELISSA FINK All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Robert Reid-Pharr Date Chair of Examining Committee Steven Kruger Date Executive Officer Robert Reid-Pharr Steven Kruger Barbara Webb Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease by Marty Fink Advisor: Robert Reid-Pharr Through a theoretical and archival analysis of HIV/AIDS literature, this dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now “over,” but a striking culmination of a long history of understanding illness through narratives of queer sexual decline and national outsiderhood. Literary representations of HIV/AIDS can be read as a means of resistance to the stigmatization of people of color, women, immigrants, and queers, debunking the narratives that vilify these subjects as threats to national security and health. In drawing connections between illness, history, and the African diaspora, my work adopts a queer theoretical approach to illuminate how boundaries around sexual and gender identities are often intertwined with representations of nationality and race. Through a feminist analysis of novels by Sarah Schulman, Rebecca Brown, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Powell and Octavia Butler, this project demonstrates how discourses of HIV/AIDS have been metaphorically and linguistically connected to symbols ranging from national borders to capitalist commodities, and even gothic vampires. In conjunction with these fictional texts, I concurrently undertake an archival study of writing by community leaders from the first decade of the pandemic whose work successfully countered and reinscribed harmful narratives of HIV/AIDS. By integrating transnational literature with archival materials by New York City-based writers including Iris De La Cruz, Katrina Haslip, and Bradley Ball, my work communicates the urgency of transcending national borders and narrative genres to effectively confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic on a global scale. v Acknowledgements: This project changed radically from its initial conception to its final draft. Its scope and ambitions would never have been realized without the inspiring encouragement and feedback of my dissertation director, Robert Reid-Pharr. I also owe great thanks to Steven Kruger and Barbara Webb, whose guidance and advice were foundational to my dissertation and to my scholarly capacities more broadly. This work began with a phone call from Sarah Schulman, then a stranger, who framed the importance of creating an academic study of HIV/AIDS which engaged with the grassroots movements and activist legacies comprising the essential but often obscured history of this disease. Schulman has filled the role of not only a personal hero but a veritable mentor whose contributions to this project have been indispensible. Thanks to everyone at the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Center Archives, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I would also like to thank my friends at AIDS Community Care Montreal and the Prisoner Correspondence Project for sharing your insights and experiences. Thanks to the Fink family for everything you’ve given me always. Thanks to my queer family for existing and nurturing me constantly. And thank you, EJ Brooks, you are a doctoral student’s true dream. (April 2010) vi Table of Contents Introduction: HIV/AIDS, Illness History, and Narratives of Resistance 1 Chapter 1: Bottom-Up in the Archives: Sarah Schulman, Activist Communities, and HIV/AIDS 47 Chapter 2: The Gift of Dykes: Queer Caregiving and Sexual Erasure in Brown’s The Gifts of the Body 104 Chapter 3: Policing Contagion: Borders and Prisons as Spaces of HIV/AIDS 154 Chapter 4: AIDS Vampires: Reclaiming Illness in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling 191 Conclusion: Toward a Model of Cultural Production as HIV Prevention 217 Works Cited 235 1 Introduction HIV/AIDS, Illness History, and Narratives of Resistance Narratives of HIV/AIDS reveal that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now “over,” but a striking culmination of a long history of perceiving illness as always infiltrating from without. Rather than viewing HIV/AIDS as an unprecedented scientific phenomenon, it should instead be positioned as a contemporary moment within an ongoing history of disease. An investigation into this history of illness uncovers that when racial and sexual boundaries are narratively sedimented as sites of contagion, the citizenship status and medical needs of those perceived as national outsiders become subject to violent neglect. A feminist analysis of fictional works by Sarah Schulman, Rebecca Brown, Patricia Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, and Octavia Butler demonstrates how narratives of HIV/AIDS discursively position gendered and racialized subjects as threats to national security and public health. In calling attention to the cultural linking of queerness and illness as well as the social construction of disease itself, these texts illuminate how illness writings can also serve as cultural interventions, allowing our present significations of HIV/AIDS to be revised and reclaimed. Integrating literary and theoretical approaches with archival works by HIV-positive community leaders including Katrina Haslip, David Wojnarowicz, and Iris De La Cruz demonstrates the urgency of revisioning illness histories and disease narratives to effectively confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic on a global scale. Situating HIV/AIDS Narratives within a History of Disease As many cultural theorists have demonstrated, HIV/AIDS is not merely a biological or scientific entity, but an event constructed by the social and political narratives we assign to 2 disease. In Altered Conditions, Julia Epstein charts these rhetorical underpinnings of illness, observing how from physicians’ case studies to epidemiologists’ reports, illness narratives imbue disease with cultural meaning. Such narratives, moreover, overdetermine individuals’ physical experiences of suffering and related stigma. From Susan Sontag to Paula Treichler, theorists have insightfully exposed the metaphors and significations underlying the medical reality of HIV infection. This work demonstrates how our understandings of HIV/AIDS cannot be separated from the anti-queer and racialized discourses through which AIDS narratives emerged. As Douglas Crimp argues in Melancholia and Moralism, “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices” (28). Similarly, AIDS: The Artists’ Response, housed at the New York Public Library archives and originally released by Gran Fury in 1989, suggests that HIV/AIDS ought to be regarded as the product of the cultural context within which it appeared: Enter AIDS. Here is—minimally—a medical condition identified and defined by committee, an edifice of words and other signs: an epidemiologic surveillance definition fitted to a stupefying variety of human conditions (diseases as symptoms). And as rapidly as AIDS became recognized and addressed by politicians, community organizers, landlords, employers, PWAs (people with AIDS), writers, and artists, it accreted the meanings by which we have come to understand it. Scholars including Thomas Long, Alexandra Juhasz, Ross Chambers, and Simon Watney have correlatively examined how media representations of the pandemic since the early 1980s have continuously framed HIV/AIDS as inextricably linked to narratives of sexual deviance and sin, constructing the pandemic as “a divine punishment for unnatural acts or a sign of individual moral collapse” (Epstein171). 3 In Policing Desire, Watney addresses the ramifications of such representations, arguing that in locating HIV/AIDS as an illness endemic to queers, drug users, and people of African descent, the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS is construed “not as accidental but as a symbolic extension of some imagined inner essence of being, manifesting itself as a disease” (8). By locating HIV/AIDS as the product of sexual and racial otherness, the media propounded the notion that this illness is the natural outcome of immorality and deviance rather than a consequence of the preexisting social stratification experienced by populations denied access to resources on the basis of race, gender, immigration status, and sexual orientation. As Epstein reveals, “epidemiologic patterns of HIV infection correlate with the inequitable economics

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