AIDS, Stigma, and Narratives of Containment

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection invades and colonizes the body, as Donna Haraway (1989) has pointed out in her expansionist analysis of immune system discourses. The body infected by HIV has also been penetrated by a set of politically and socially hostile notions of contagion, pollution, and threatening communicability. These are precisely the notions that have characterized homophobia and white racism in the age of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Reports of the epidemic in the West speak about “leakage” from the initially identified “risk groups” of homosexuals, Haitians, and heroin addicts into an amorphously defined but clearly white, middle-class, suburban, “decent” and above all heterosexual “general population,” a population that is carefully defined against the transgressive otherness of same-sex sexuality, racial difference, drug use, and illness.1

Paul Monette's (1988) powerful poetic elegies for Roger Horwitz, who died in October 1986, capture one aspect of the sense that infection requires us to set up barriers, to do vigilant housekeeping. In “The Worrying,” Monette writes (11):

my rags and vitamins dumb as leeches how did the meningitis get in where did I slip up what didn't I scour I'd have swathed the city in gauze to cushion you no man who hasn't watched his crudest worry come true in a room with no door can ever know what doesn't die because they lie who say it's over

Scrubbing cloths; protecting potions; sucking leeches: still the room has no door, not even a curtain. Monette's searing