Possessed by Pathology
How science took my body (without waiting for me to leave it)
Delivered at Possession
The Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence, University of Sydney
8 June 2001
Like other material possessions, our bodies or parts of them can be bequeathed. I can leave my eyes and other organs to be transplanted into another, I can donate my blood or leave my whole body to be dissected by medical students. They are part of my estate, although so far they can only be left to science or medicine. I relish the idea of expanding the list of potential beneficiaries: I imagine the inconvenience that receiving my decaying corpse would cause to a whole range of people and institutions. Could I arrange for it to be delivered at work, so that they would have to struggle home with me on the train?
Notwithstanding our Cartesian pretensions, we don’t often like to think of our bodies as property. Perhaps in rejecting slavery, we also rejected a certain kind of objectification, a certain notion of transferability. We associate our bodies and our selves too closely, and fear the idea of losing or selling ourselves, looking with distaste on those who do. My recent research is with male sex workers, who daily sell their bodies, and whose major struggle is retaining possession of some sense of themselves. The more experienced workers are strategic about this struggle for possession. They set physical and emotional boundaries, they monitor the psychological plays of their clients closely, they minimise their physical danger, they erect and maintain no-man’s land between their work and the private self. They acknowledge the fragility of self-possession, and guard against its loss.
“Selling yourself” is about allowing penetration, about the violation of bodily integrity: we mark and patrol the physical boundaries of our bodies obsessively against such penetration. We concentrate our attention on those areas where the outside becomes the inside, and treat as dirt those things that come into the outside from the inside: sputum, semen, urine, faeces, menstrual or any other blood. We give them nasty short names: snot, shit, fart. Ugly words to mark the things that are no longer us or ours.
The same fears, the same stigmas, attach to some of the things that come from the outside to be part of us. Diseases, particularly life-threatening diseases, attack our self-possession from within. We look askance at people with cancer or AIDS – how could they have allowed a foreign organism to take over their bodies in this way? My mother, while recovering from a melanoma whose removal meant the loss of most of one of her calves, talked in terms of betrayal, of a loss of trust in her own body. Her illness made her complete the Cartesian separation: she ceded her body to the cancer, and for a long time lived as a captive soul within a body she neither trusted nor asserted ownership of. My friend Andrew, recently diagnosed with bowel cancer, has a horror of the colostomy bag that he will soon have to wear. Again, for him there is a loss of ontological security; the body he has owned since birth is no longer him nor his. His bowel is to be removed, and the end stage of his digestive process – the way that we integrate the outside world into ourselves so that we can continue to operate in that world – will now be conducted by a disposable plastic bag.
My own confrontation with pathological possession is perhaps more unsettling, a battle for possession of my immune system that I have been waging with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus since about 1993. It is an insidious organism, worming its way through my epithelium and into my bloodstream. My immune system – the security system of my bodily house – sends its guard dogs, the CD4 cells, to investigate the intruder. In scenes reminiscent of the Alien films, the HIV particles attach themselves to the skin of each of my CD4 cells, and inject their DNA into the CD4 cell’s cytoplasm. The alien DNA uses the cell’s own reproductive system to produce multiple copies of itself, finally bursting through the walls of the cell and spewing thousands of copies of itself into my bloodstream, to go searching for other CD4s. HIV does little other than take possession of my immune system, destroying it in the process, and rendering my body Terra Nullius, ripe for settlement by every other pathological organism known to medical science. Otherwise harmless fungal spores colonise my brain, digestive tract and skin, bacteria and viral particles invade my entire system, even my own cells undergo routine mutagenesis, but without the maintenance of my immune system, become cancers that begin to eat my organs.
To understand the state of play, who has possession of the ball – a crystal ball, my future – medical science has devised a new form of alchemy, in which they turn blood into numbers. Every few months, a doctor takes my blood, and a laboratory processes it. The blood is never returned, it is no longer mine. Instead the laboratory returns numbers to the doctor, who keeps the numbers in a file which bears my name, but does not belong to me. The blood and the numbers don’t even bear my name: instead, they have taken my name and birth date and constructed a code from them. WI from my surname, JO from my Christian name – WIJO 11021961 is the designation they have for me, my blood, my records. WIJO gets two counts each time: a viral load, which measures the number of viral particles in each millilitre of the blood; and a CD4 count, which measures the number of CD4 immune cells left in every microlitre of the blood. The numbers tell the doctor how successful the virus is in invading the body – they indicate how long the body will survive. He uses them to make decisions about treatment.
Yesterday I visited my doctor to get the latest set of numbers. I have been untreated for six months, since lactic acid in my blood reached dangerous levels. In HIV medicine, when they say dangerous, they mean potentially lethal. I expected the worst from this doctor’s appointment, and got it. After having an undetectable viral load for more than three years, the viral load yesterday was over 400,000 – the highest it has ever been to my knowledge.
I resist this information, and try to imagine each of these viral particles. I think about the fact that if there are more than 400,000 of them in every millilitre of blood, and I have more than seven litres of blood in my body, then that means that there are more than 2,800,000,000 of them inside me. Hell, there could be 3 billion of them! How much do they weigh, I idly wonder? Could this explain my recent weight gain? I try to do the calculation: I have gained five kilos since December, that’s 5,000 grams or 5,000,000 milligrams, and there are about 2,800,000,000 new viral particles. That means each of them weighs .002 of a milligram. I can’t imagine one thousandth of a milligram, so I shift to a new tack. Where did all those protein chains come from? How much of my food intake is being wasted on creating these viral particles? I make a mental note to reduce my daily intake of kilojoules and give them less to work with. I look at myself closely in a mirror, watching my skin anxiously. Surely that many viral particles would make my skin bulge in some way: I should be able to see it, shouldn't I? There are no visible bulges so far, but other signs of the virus at work. The paisley pattern of leukoplakia on my tongue, the spots of psoriasis...
Yesterday, the other number, the CD4 count, was up as well – this represents the team playing on my side. It was also the highest it has ever been, about 900 CD4s in each microlitre. It seems to me that these CD4s, a mere 6.3 billion of them, will have their work cut out dealing with all that new virus. Perhaps I shouldn’t stop eating after all: they’ll need some energy to do their work. With a sigh, I reach for another chocolate biscuit.
Of course, chocolate is not the only weapon in my arsenal. Fortunately, drug companies have leapt into the battle for my body, inventing a range of drugs as insidious as HIV itself. Nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitors: designer molecules that infiltrate my CD4 cells, physically blocking HIV from using the genetic mechanisms of my cells to reproduce itself. Geneticists, immunologists, haematologists and the companies they work for have leveraged my defence against this hostile takeover. Of course, this has required financing, and some accommodation on my part.
In terms of accommodation, in my most recent round of treatment, which lasted for eighteen months, I had to take six Indinavir sulphate capsules a day (two, three times a day), four Didanosine (DDI) tablets once a day, and two Stavudine (D4T) capsules a day. The Indinavir had to be taken at precise eight-hourly intervals, with a two-hour fast before, and an hour without food afterwards. The DDI required similar fasting periods, but could not be taken within an hour of Indinavir. The D4T had to be taken at 12 hourly intervals, although without food restrictions. My days were completely subsumed by pill schedules, and trying to squeeze three meals into the five waking hours a day when I was allowed to eat. Fortunately I was nauseated more of the time, and so didn’t mind missing meals. I lost twenty kilograms in weight – one fifth of my body – and never got eight hours sleep. But there was no detectable virus in the blood they took each month.
There were, however, other problems – physical and ontological. The drugs are toxic and unpredictable. D4T, not content with simply preventing HIV transcription, took it on itself to alter my fat metabolism, and stripped subcutaneous fat completely from my arms and legs. Indinavir joined in, depositing hard lumps of fat in my viscera and on my neck. Skinny arms, skinny legs, a huge round belly, breasts and a buffalo hump. Not only was HIV trying to take possession of my immune system, but the antivirals had decided to take my body and self-image out for a spin. The hair on my head grew thin and brittle and somehow faded, my body hair fell out, my skin grew dry and flaky, my bones porous and brittle. My feet ached when I walked as the fat pads on the soles of my feet disappeared, and I couldn’t sit for long as my pelvis dug sharply into my uncushioned glutes. My nutritionist told me to eat as though I were seventy years old and pregnant – and indeed, a seventy year old pregnant man stared back at me from the mirror. Fortunately, as I lost minor fat deposits on my face, and my parotid glands swelled up, I became less certain that the pregnant old man staring back was me.
Like all bodily modification, this iatrogenic transformation has cost a packet. Developing HIV drugs is big business (particularly now that a Californian biotech company has managed to copyright the human genome. It is surely only a matter of time until they start licensing each of us to use their patented genome for normal growth and development – like Microsoft © Windows, it comes preloaded with every system. In the meantime, they are only charging research scientists through the nose for the use of it.) Although there are 50 million people with HIV in the world, very few of them can actually afford the drugs to fight it – those of us who can, are repaying the development costs with interest. In Australia, this cost is mostly picked up by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. My treatment should have cost me $14,000 a year, but living in an advanced and wealthy democracy means that most of these costs were met.
In exchange for the drugs that have kept me alive, albeit in slightly shopworn condition, I have become the property of the Public Health System. My life – my body – is now mortgaged to the federal government. There is a national strategy that says how my health, educational and cultural needs as a positive person will be dealt with. These requirements are couched in overtly post-modern terms: I will be assisted with my self-regulation to be a good and healthy citizen to the best of my and the government’s capacity. My favourite part of the policy is the challenge at 3.2.3 to:
It is clear here what the mortgage on my health comprises: a requirement of compliance with “safe-sex culture”, an agreement to scrutiny and surveillance, a kind of comportment from all gay men. I wonder about “maintenance” and “reinforcement” of sexual culture, and the practices and compromises that might entail. I worry that what passes for my health these days has been purchased at the expenses of my brothers’ freedom. Those of you who are not gay, perhaps you would like to think about the impact of hearing your sexual practice discussed on the ABC National News as I did this past Wednesday, of having the likes of Chris Puplick call you to public task about your morals on ABC’s Lateline program the same day. The Facts and Figures Report, whose release last Wednesday by the National Centre for HIV Social Research prompted this public discussion, holds up to sometimes hostile and always impertinent scrutiny the sexual lives of 1800 or so gay Australian men. I wonder what on earth possessed them to return the survey. Reading the report, I am reminded of a poem by Essex Hemphill, a black American poet who died of AIDS a few years ago. The poem is called The Occupied Territories, and the final stanza reads:
If, as Janis tells us, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then there is an opposition, a tension even, between emancipation and possession. My emancipation – from multiple possessions – is problematic. To be free of the virus, I take the drugs that tie me in servitude to medical intervention that in turn mortgages me to Public Health scrutiny. While I still have CD4 cells, while I still have a functioning immune system, however compromised, I will never be free. I will always have something left to lose, something that can be traded with industry and government.
Postscript:
My options then are threefold: to succumb to viral possession, and lose my subservience to the pharmaceutical industry and the government through death; to accept and learn to live with my compromised state, a tenant in my own body; or to take on the recognition of my body as a militarised zone, where a war for control is taking place, and organise a resistance movement. The control is the kind of self-regulation that we post-Foucauldians are familiar with, and the territorialisation of my body definitely Deleuzian. The challenge is to find a resistance that is not ultimately self-destructive: I don’t want the federal government to renege on their self-imposed responsibility to provide me with affordable access to reasonably effective medication. This is a war on two fronts. On the one hand, I need to resist the reductionism of the medical approach to HIV – an issue that I have taken up elsewhere (the NAPWA conference paper on numbers). On the other, I need to challenge the notion that there is a right to subject me (through my communities or otherwise) to the kind of scrutiny represented by Facts and Figures, and touch wood, everything will be OK. The problem with the scrutiny is that it is (being) engaged in a process of meaning construction: the meaning of an infected body; the meaning of positive sexuality; the meaning of gay sexuality; the meaning of citizenship. My body, my sexuality, my citizenship are at stake in this process, which is currently being conducted by people who are not (necessarily or openly) positive and not (necessarily or openly) gay. If I can remetaphorise this process as a card game, I only have two cards – I have a terminal and infectious disease for which there is no cure, and a tenuous grip on some slightly higher moral ground. Both are Jokers. The players on the other side hold any number of cards which can trump either of the ones I hold: drugs, hospitals, prisons – life and liberty. Given that the whole idea is not to fold, I either need better cards, or I need to bluff really well. I think I’m going to start working on my poker face.
How science took my body (without waiting for me to leave it)
Delivered at Possession
The Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence, University of Sydney
8 June 2001
Like other material possessions, our bodies or parts of them can be bequeathed. I can leave my eyes and other organs to be transplanted into another, I can donate my blood or leave my whole body to be dissected by medical students. They are part of my estate, although so far they can only be left to science or medicine. I relish the idea of expanding the list of potential beneficiaries: I imagine the inconvenience that receiving my decaying corpse would cause to a whole range of people and institutions. Could I arrange for it to be delivered at work, so that they would have to struggle home with me on the train?
Notwithstanding our Cartesian pretensions, we don’t often like to think of our bodies as property. Perhaps in rejecting slavery, we also rejected a certain kind of objectification, a certain notion of transferability. We associate our bodies and our selves too closely, and fear the idea of losing or selling ourselves, looking with distaste on those who do. My recent research is with male sex workers, who daily sell their bodies, and whose major struggle is retaining possession of some sense of themselves. The more experienced workers are strategic about this struggle for possession. They set physical and emotional boundaries, they monitor the psychological plays of their clients closely, they minimise their physical danger, they erect and maintain no-man’s land between their work and the private self. They acknowledge the fragility of self-possession, and guard against its loss.
“Selling yourself” is about allowing penetration, about the violation of bodily integrity: we mark and patrol the physical boundaries of our bodies obsessively against such penetration. We concentrate our attention on those areas where the outside becomes the inside, and treat as dirt those things that come into the outside from the inside: sputum, semen, urine, faeces, menstrual or any other blood. We give them nasty short names: snot, shit, fart. Ugly words to mark the things that are no longer us or ours.
The same fears, the same stigmas, attach to some of the things that come from the outside to be part of us. Diseases, particularly life-threatening diseases, attack our self-possession from within. We look askance at people with cancer or AIDS – how could they have allowed a foreign organism to take over their bodies in this way? My mother, while recovering from a melanoma whose removal meant the loss of most of one of her calves, talked in terms of betrayal, of a loss of trust in her own body. Her illness made her complete the Cartesian separation: she ceded her body to the cancer, and for a long time lived as a captive soul within a body she neither trusted nor asserted ownership of. My friend Andrew, recently diagnosed with bowel cancer, has a horror of the colostomy bag that he will soon have to wear. Again, for him there is a loss of ontological security; the body he has owned since birth is no longer him nor his. His bowel is to be removed, and the end stage of his digestive process – the way that we integrate the outside world into ourselves so that we can continue to operate in that world – will now be conducted by a disposable plastic bag.
My own confrontation with pathological possession is perhaps more unsettling, a battle for possession of my immune system that I have been waging with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus since about 1993. It is an insidious organism, worming its way through my epithelium and into my bloodstream. My immune system – the security system of my bodily house – sends its guard dogs, the CD4 cells, to investigate the intruder. In scenes reminiscent of the Alien films, the HIV particles attach themselves to the skin of each of my CD4 cells, and inject their DNA into the CD4 cell’s cytoplasm. The alien DNA uses the cell’s own reproductive system to produce multiple copies of itself, finally bursting through the walls of the cell and spewing thousands of copies of itself into my bloodstream, to go searching for other CD4s. HIV does little other than take possession of my immune system, destroying it in the process, and rendering my body Terra Nullius, ripe for settlement by every other pathological organism known to medical science. Otherwise harmless fungal spores colonise my brain, digestive tract and skin, bacteria and viral particles invade my entire system, even my own cells undergo routine mutagenesis, but without the maintenance of my immune system, become cancers that begin to eat my organs.
To understand the state of play, who has possession of the ball – a crystal ball, my future – medical science has devised a new form of alchemy, in which they turn blood into numbers. Every few months, a doctor takes my blood, and a laboratory processes it. The blood is never returned, it is no longer mine. Instead the laboratory returns numbers to the doctor, who keeps the numbers in a file which bears my name, but does not belong to me. The blood and the numbers don’t even bear my name: instead, they have taken my name and birth date and constructed a code from them. WI from my surname, JO from my Christian name – WIJO 11021961 is the designation they have for me, my blood, my records. WIJO gets two counts each time: a viral load, which measures the number of viral particles in each millilitre of the blood; and a CD4 count, which measures the number of CD4 immune cells left in every microlitre of the blood. The numbers tell the doctor how successful the virus is in invading the body – they indicate how long the body will survive. He uses them to make decisions about treatment.
Yesterday I visited my doctor to get the latest set of numbers. I have been untreated for six months, since lactic acid in my blood reached dangerous levels. In HIV medicine, when they say dangerous, they mean potentially lethal. I expected the worst from this doctor’s appointment, and got it. After having an undetectable viral load for more than three years, the viral load yesterday was over 400,000 – the highest it has ever been to my knowledge.
I resist this information, and try to imagine each of these viral particles. I think about the fact that if there are more than 400,000 of them in every millilitre of blood, and I have more than seven litres of blood in my body, then that means that there are more than 2,800,000,000 of them inside me. Hell, there could be 3 billion of them! How much do they weigh, I idly wonder? Could this explain my recent weight gain? I try to do the calculation: I have gained five kilos since December, that’s 5,000 grams or 5,000,000 milligrams, and there are about 2,800,000,000 new viral particles. That means each of them weighs .002 of a milligram. I can’t imagine one thousandth of a milligram, so I shift to a new tack. Where did all those protein chains come from? How much of my food intake is being wasted on creating these viral particles? I make a mental note to reduce my daily intake of kilojoules and give them less to work with. I look at myself closely in a mirror, watching my skin anxiously. Surely that many viral particles would make my skin bulge in some way: I should be able to see it, shouldn't I? There are no visible bulges so far, but other signs of the virus at work. The paisley pattern of leukoplakia on my tongue, the spots of psoriasis...
Yesterday, the other number, the CD4 count, was up as well – this represents the team playing on my side. It was also the highest it has ever been, about 900 CD4s in each microlitre. It seems to me that these CD4s, a mere 6.3 billion of them, will have their work cut out dealing with all that new virus. Perhaps I shouldn’t stop eating after all: they’ll need some energy to do their work. With a sigh, I reach for another chocolate biscuit.
Of course, chocolate is not the only weapon in my arsenal. Fortunately, drug companies have leapt into the battle for my body, inventing a range of drugs as insidious as HIV itself. Nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitors: designer molecules that infiltrate my CD4 cells, physically blocking HIV from using the genetic mechanisms of my cells to reproduce itself. Geneticists, immunologists, haematologists and the companies they work for have leveraged my defence against this hostile takeover. Of course, this has required financing, and some accommodation on my part.
In terms of accommodation, in my most recent round of treatment, which lasted for eighteen months, I had to take six Indinavir sulphate capsules a day (two, three times a day), four Didanosine (DDI) tablets once a day, and two Stavudine (D4T) capsules a day. The Indinavir had to be taken at precise eight-hourly intervals, with a two-hour fast before, and an hour without food afterwards. The DDI required similar fasting periods, but could not be taken within an hour of Indinavir. The D4T had to be taken at 12 hourly intervals, although without food restrictions. My days were completely subsumed by pill schedules, and trying to squeeze three meals into the five waking hours a day when I was allowed to eat. Fortunately I was nauseated more of the time, and so didn’t mind missing meals. I lost twenty kilograms in weight – one fifth of my body – and never got eight hours sleep. But there was no detectable virus in the blood they took each month.
There were, however, other problems – physical and ontological. The drugs are toxic and unpredictable. D4T, not content with simply preventing HIV transcription, took it on itself to alter my fat metabolism, and stripped subcutaneous fat completely from my arms and legs. Indinavir joined in, depositing hard lumps of fat in my viscera and on my neck. Skinny arms, skinny legs, a huge round belly, breasts and a buffalo hump. Not only was HIV trying to take possession of my immune system, but the antivirals had decided to take my body and self-image out for a spin. The hair on my head grew thin and brittle and somehow faded, my body hair fell out, my skin grew dry and flaky, my bones porous and brittle. My feet ached when I walked as the fat pads on the soles of my feet disappeared, and I couldn’t sit for long as my pelvis dug sharply into my uncushioned glutes. My nutritionist told me to eat as though I were seventy years old and pregnant – and indeed, a seventy year old pregnant man stared back at me from the mirror. Fortunately, as I lost minor fat deposits on my face, and my parotid glands swelled up, I became less certain that the pregnant old man staring back was me.
Like all bodily modification, this iatrogenic transformation has cost a packet. Developing HIV drugs is big business (particularly now that a Californian biotech company has managed to copyright the human genome. It is surely only a matter of time until they start licensing each of us to use their patented genome for normal growth and development – like Microsoft © Windows, it comes preloaded with every system. In the meantime, they are only charging research scientists through the nose for the use of it.) Although there are 50 million people with HIV in the world, very few of them can actually afford the drugs to fight it – those of us who can, are repaying the development costs with interest. In Australia, this cost is mostly picked up by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. My treatment should have cost me $14,000 a year, but living in an advanced and wealthy democracy means that most of these costs were met.
In exchange for the drugs that have kept me alive, albeit in slightly shopworn condition, I have become the property of the Public Health System. My life – my body – is now mortgaged to the federal government. There is a national strategy that says how my health, educational and cultural needs as a positive person will be dealt with. These requirements are couched in overtly post-modern terms: I will be assisted with my self-regulation to be a good and healthy citizen to the best of my and the government’s capacity. My favourite part of the policy is the challenge at 3.2.3 to:
Maintain and reinforce the safe sex culture among gay and other homosexually active men in the face of a changing epidemic and changing perceptions of the risk of HIV transmission, in the broader context of gay and other homosexually active men’s health.
It is clear here what the mortgage on my health comprises: a requirement of compliance with “safe-sex culture”, an agreement to scrutiny and surveillance, a kind of comportment from all gay men. I wonder about “maintenance” and “reinforcement” of sexual culture, and the practices and compromises that might entail. I worry that what passes for my health these days has been purchased at the expenses of my brothers’ freedom. Those of you who are not gay, perhaps you would like to think about the impact of hearing your sexual practice discussed on the ABC National News as I did this past Wednesday, of having the likes of Chris Puplick call you to public task about your morals on ABC’s Lateline program the same day. The Facts and Figures Report, whose release last Wednesday by the National Centre for HIV Social Research prompted this public discussion, holds up to sometimes hostile and always impertinent scrutiny the sexual lives of 1800 or so gay Australian men. I wonder what on earth possessed them to return the survey. Reading the report, I am reminded of a poem by Essex Hemphill, a black American poet who died of AIDS a few years ago. The poem is called The Occupied Territories, and the final stanza reads:
You are not to touch other flesh without a police permit.
You have no privacy – the State wants to seize your bed and sleep with you.
The State wants to control your sexuality, your birth rate, your passion.
The message is clear: your penis, your vagina, your testicles, your womb, your anus, your orgasm, these belong to the State.
You are not to touch yourself or be familiar with ecstasy.
The erogenous zones are not demilitarized.
If, as Janis tells us, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then there is an opposition, a tension even, between emancipation and possession. My emancipation – from multiple possessions – is problematic. To be free of the virus, I take the drugs that tie me in servitude to medical intervention that in turn mortgages me to Public Health scrutiny. While I still have CD4 cells, while I still have a functioning immune system, however compromised, I will never be free. I will always have something left to lose, something that can be traded with industry and government.
Postscript:
My options then are threefold: to succumb to viral possession, and lose my subservience to the pharmaceutical industry and the government through death; to accept and learn to live with my compromised state, a tenant in my own body; or to take on the recognition of my body as a militarised zone, where a war for control is taking place, and organise a resistance movement. The control is the kind of self-regulation that we post-Foucauldians are familiar with, and the territorialisation of my body definitely Deleuzian. The challenge is to find a resistance that is not ultimately self-destructive: I don’t want the federal government to renege on their self-imposed responsibility to provide me with affordable access to reasonably effective medication. This is a war on two fronts. On the one hand, I need to resist the reductionism of the medical approach to HIV – an issue that I have taken up elsewhere (the NAPWA conference paper on numbers). On the other, I need to challenge the notion that there is a right to subject me (through my communities or otherwise) to the kind of scrutiny represented by Facts and Figures, and touch wood, everything will be OK. The problem with the scrutiny is that it is (being) engaged in a process of meaning construction: the meaning of an infected body; the meaning of positive sexuality; the meaning of gay sexuality; the meaning of citizenship. My body, my sexuality, my citizenship are at stake in this process, which is currently being conducted by people who are not (necessarily or openly) positive and not (necessarily or openly) gay. If I can remetaphorise this process as a card game, I only have two cards – I have a terminal and infectious disease for which there is no cure, and a tenuous grip on some slightly higher moral ground. Both are Jokers. The players on the other side hold any number of cards which can trump either of the ones I hold: drugs, hospitals, prisons – life and liberty. Given that the whole idea is not to fold, I either need better cards, or I need to bluff really well. I think I’m going to start working on my poker face.
No comments:
Post a Comment