Disappearing bodies and the coverage of the AIDS crises in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990sDR DEIRDRE QUINN

Discursive Shifts: ‘marked’ to ‘unmarked’ bodies

Anon, “I wasn’t told I had AIDS” in Hot press 10.13(1986) 12.

O’ Connell, Claire, “Tracking Dublin’s HIV Scene” in The Irish Times Health plus 29 November 2011, 15.

The biomedical imagination is caught up ‘in broader cultural narratives and power relations’ Walby, Catherine, AIDS and Biomedicine (London: Routledge, 1996) 6

“the order of the solid, visible body is only one way, in all likelihood neither the first nor the most fundamental in which one spatalises diseases. There have been and will be other distribution of disease.” (Foucault, Michel. 1976:3)

Precariousness as a generalised condition relies on a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world; responsiveness – and thus, ultimately, responsibility - is located in the affective responses to a sustaining an impinging world. Because such affective responses are invariably mediated, they call upon and enact certain interpretative frames; they can also call into question the taken- for- granted character of those frames, and in that way provide the affective conditions for social critique.”

Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010) 34

Demonization of the working class

https://youtu.be/16OcC1dwuO0 Today, Tonight (Producer Joe Mulholland) RTÉ Archives: 97D01625 1987 Vigilantes versus IV drug users

Macro – working classMicro- working class female addicts

“selling more than just sex” “perfect bridge into a wider community” “female addicts will prostitute” “battle” “ front” https://youtu.be/3BMpBsp_GX4

Lost white generations/lost black generations

Female working class addicts demonised as the link between interruptions to the family and loss.

This is the same framing within which reporting on AIDS and HIV in Africa was contained in the next decade.

https://youtu.be/HaxXsBSmDbk

Medical metaphor s

‘The African Holocaust’ Prime Time Special Report

08/06/2000

The Language of Prime Time

Isolation of women in their traditional gender space ‘darkening shadows’ Focus on prostitution and the body of the absent

mother. South African Department of Health speaks of

‘immobilising against AIDS’ Justin Maeda, an UNCIEF representative, speaks of AIDS

in Africa as a ‘human disaster

Mothering of Africa

Feminisation of AIDS through representation of generations of mothers

Space of the maternal a construct through which we access AIDS in Africa

AIDS and HIV are presented as loss, as emotional and as something that has already surpassed a point of return.

Men and prostitutes are seen as the source of infection. Space of the semiotic which disrupts the symbolic order It disrupts the ‘phallocentric social order’ (Walby, C 9)

however, the framing of illness and loss in this way compounds the distance between Africa as unfamiliar in comaparison to a recognisable ‘we’

There is a “challenge before us to rethink and reformulate a conception of global responsibility that would counter this imperialist appropriation and its politics of imposition.” Butler, Judith, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010) 37