AIDS as Metaphor:

1. AIDS as Metaphor: Body Politic and Culture of Surveillance By DesiWimberly and John Wilkinson

2. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) • Born in New York, raised in Tuscon, AZ and Los Angeles, CA • Celebrated writer and academic • Taught Freshman English at Uconn, 1951-1952 • Identified as bisexual • Wrote extensively about cancer, HIV/AIDS, and illness • Died from complications of cancer

3. HIV/AIDS • What do you know about HIV/AIDS? • What is your perception of people who have HIV/AIDS? • How can someone contract HIV/AIDS and when you think of someone contracting HIV and developing AIDS, what do you think of?

4. HIV/AIDS Definition • HIVis an acronym for Human ImmunodeficiencyVirus. The virus destroys important cells that fight disease and infection. Can stay hidden for prolonged periods of time (approx. 6 months). Attacks “T-Cells,” key part of the immune system used in fighting infections and disease. The virus invades “T-Cells,” using them to make copies of itself before destroying them.

5. HIV/AIDS Definition (Cont.) • AIDSis an acronym for AcquiredImmunodeficiency Syndrome. Once the virus has killed enough “T-Cells,” so that the immune system can no longer fight infections and disease, and the body is attacked by “Opportunistic Infections” that it cannot fight off. • AIDS is the final stage of HIV

6. Current HIV/AIDS Trends • Lower Transmission Rates • More Awareness • Cause of Death • Late Diagnosis • Disproportionate Impact • CDC

7. Body Politic and Language • Rudolf Virchow (1850): Founder of cellular pathology; referred to the body as being like a society (Sontag 94f.) • Body Politic: a nation regarded as a corporate entity; a state • OED • Also utilized to describe the representation of a body in terms typically associated with a state • Emphasizes the relationship between a condition and the language used to describe the condition and the perception of those with the condition. • Militaristic diction and metaphor (Sontag 99) • Disease and Foreigness (Sontag 136)

8. Body Politic (Cont.) • John Donne – “describes illness as an enemy that invades, that lays siege to the body-fortress” (Sontag 195) • “Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations” (Sontag 156) • Does the militaristic metaphor of “invading” illnesses gender the language and perception of people with medical conditions?

9. Myths and Misconceptions • What do you know about the early contraction of HIV/AIDS?

10. Myths and Misconceptions (Cont.) • Comes from sex with monkeys and bestiality • Only homosexuals/minorities can contract it • Spread by homosexuals • Government conspiracy and form of eugenics • Devine retribution for hedonism

11. Myths and Misconceptions (Cont.) • Hunters in West Africa killed and ate infected chimpanzees • May have been spread from infected chimpanzees as far back as the late-1800s • AIDS.gov

12. Myths and Misconceptions (Cont.) • AIDS is an acquired medical condition, not an illness in and of itself. • Diagnosed in Temporal Stages • Has a “dual metaphoric geneology” (Sontag 105): micro-process is equated with invasion and transmission is equated with pollution.

13. Perception of HIV/AIDS Diagnosis • “Fictions of Responsibility” (Sontag 100) • Tuberculosis, Syphilis, Cancer, HIV/AIDS • AIDS is perceived as a violation and invasion of the body, being contracted from outside (without) rather than coming from the body itself (within) • HIV kills cells, Cancer mutates and proliferates

14. Body Politic and Literary Representation • “All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death’” • “[T]here came yet another chiming of the clock, and then there were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.” • Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”

15. Causality and Perception • “Member of a certain ‘risk group’ • “Flushes out an identity” • “Confirms an identity” • Associated with hedonism, indulgence, and delinquancy • Sontag 112f.

16. Causality and Perception (Cont.) • Does the language of invasion and weakness of the body serve as a contradiction to ideas of control and masculinity? • Does the perception of HIV/AIDS serve to actively exclude an “other” or “without” despite the universality of the conditon? • Sexualities, Minorites

17. Culture of Surveillance • “Surveillance based on a system of permanent registration” • “The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through representatives of power, the registrations they make of it, the decisions they take on it” • Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” 196f.

18. Culture of Surveillance (Cont.) • Do you think that there is a correlation between ideas of surveillance and people who are HIV/AIDS positive? • Categorization • How does this possible surveillance disrupt notions of masculinity?

19. Pedro Zamora • 1972-1994 • Declared HIV/AIDS positive at 17 and died of related complications at 22 • One of the first openly gay, HIV/AIDS positive individuals in media • Garnered attention through MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco • Pedro Zamora Documentary

20. Sources • AIDS.gov. “What is HIV/AIDS?” • "body politic, n.". OED Online. Oxford University Press. 26 March 2013. • CDC, “HIV/AIDS Today” • Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print. • MTV. “A Tribute to Pedro Zamora.” • Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Masque of the Red Death” • Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 1989. Print.