The representation of women and the spread of HIV

The spread of HIV throughout the world has certainly served as a screen against which preexisting power modes of power been projected, power which has defined and controlled the production of identity of a myriad of “risk groups”, presenting us with the “homosexual”, the “IV drug user”, the “prostitute” and the “long-distance truck driver”, to name but a few. By creating these discrete groups (which are generally understood to be mutually exclusive, not only to each other, but also with the “norm”), subjects have been created, subjects whose possible trajectories have been pre-determined, whose “otherness” as been taken for granted and whose voices have all but been lost in the crowd of the researchers and academics who have written the definitive accounts of “the AIDS epidemic”. While this paper will certainly only be adding to that crowd of academics (though nearly imperceptibly), I hope to elucidate some of those modes of power which have created distinct groups by simply the application of a name, thus cordoning off certain behaviors, nationalities and even genders from the “general population”.

This paper will seek to understand the contradictory representations of “women” in HIV/AIDS discourse. While Treicher notes the lack of research interest in, if not the outright denial of, women’s involvement (or at least the involvement of “normal women”) with HIV in the 1980’s, attitudes have shifted significantly in the 1990’s and the 21^st century, where women have frequently been portrayed as “vectors of disease”—prostitutes transmitting HIV to their clients, mothers transmitting HIV to their children, and, more generally, women holding “the key” to preventing the spread of HIV to the “general population”. Beyond merely placing blame or responsibility for the transmission of the virus, women have also been denied a place among the ranks of “victims”, appearing as carriers or not at all it would seem.

Moreover, HIV is a very strongly sexed pathogen. Due to its beginnings (in the North) as a disease of the gay man, it became and has remained a male disease. Women were reassured that this STI would not be transmissible to them, that this was simply the “fatal price of anal intercourse” (interestingly, also defining heterosexual sex as purely vaginal). Through this characterization of HIV, men were defined from the outset as the primary concerned population.

This “male disease”, it will be shown, is a product of a consistently patriarchal system of symbolic representation, as described by theorist such as Irigaray, Beauvoir and Butler. In the theory of Beauvoir, women are linguistically defined as the sex which is not male (which is defined as the “universal”), they exist as the only marked sex, indeed, they exist as the classic “other” which the “normal” uses to both construct its own identity and obscure its very construction. Irigaray takes a seemingly oppositional approach, seeing women being left as the undefined and undefinable completely outside of an uncompromisingly patriarchal linguistic system; indeed, women are everything that fails to be male, thus defining women as a multiple gender (or the “sex that is not one”). These two theories, however, seem to converge in agreement that the male is the “norm”, the “default”, leaving “female” to constitute something “abnormal” and certainly, leaving it simply as “not-male”.

Under the lens of these theories, it will become clear how this disease, first described in the “all-male” world of the homosexual community in the United States, consistently failed to be given a designation of anything other than this false universality of masculinity. Though very little has actually changed in the representation of HIV infection (as a “gay”, or “male”, disease) in the North, the representation of HIV as a male disease has had to undergo significant modification to “fit” the pattern of transmission in the South, especially in Africa. In Africa, HIV infection, most often transmitted through heterosexual exchange of fluids, has been characterized as a disease of displacement (echoing, perhaps, the 19^th- and 20^th century discourses on tuberculosis as a “disease of civilization”?), affecting primarily those displaced and living along the paths of major population shifts. Here, there is much talk about long-distance truckers and migratory labor (including mining and agriculture), where prostitutes, beyond receiving blame for their infection and transmitting it to others, are consistently relegated to the position of the passive “pool” of infection which spreads then to the more “active” individuals, ie, the mobile males. Further along the represented chain of infection (which is in no way merely linear), women are again left out, receiving no mention as receiving HIV from an infected partner, but again garnering blame in passing HIV on to her innocent unborn offspring.

Throughout this paper I will also refer to the contradictory roles defined for women, both as the dangerously sexual deviant (or temptress) and as the impossibly passive maternal caregiver, and how these defined roles are both a product of and productive of the discourse obscuring the role of women in the global epidemic of HIV infection (whether or not one chooses to “believe” in AIDS as such). Overall, I hope to show that the rigidly binary production of identity (male/female, gay/straight, the norm/the other) seriously obscures both the mechanisms by which these designations are produced and the effects of these designations, especially in the transmission of such a “political” disease.

[check out:

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. (New York: Routledge).

Foucault, Michel (1973) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (New York: Penguin).

Treicher, P. A. (1999) How to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS. (Durham: Duke University Press).

that should get you started, but if you're still needing more, check out books by Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray or "Bodies that matter" (so i'm told, i haven't actually read this myself) by Butler (above)]