BETWEEN AFFECTIVE HISTORIES AND PUBLIC RHETORICS:

AIDS, ACTIVISM, AND THE PROBLEM OF ADDRESS

Penelope Ironstone-Catterall

Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

In this article, I will address a recurring tension, a tension that inheres in AIDS discourses generally and AIDS activist rhetorics produced from a queer perspective more particularly. It is a tension that is a central part of the queer history of the trauma of AIDS, to which this activism has attempted to respond.  In this article, I will trace a history, which also persists in the more contemporary history of AIDS in inner-city America, in Hispanic and African-American communities, and also in the larger international scene of AIDS, and often takes “Africa” as its focus.  This tension is one that continues to trouble AIDS education campaigns and activisms. I am speaking here about both rhetoric and AIDS, of the problem of making AIDS intelligible in politicality and of framing addresses both to and from AIDS at a time when resistances to its information abound. AIDS activism continues to have to address the tensions between what Jonathan Silin (1995) calls “our passion for ignorance” and the impossibility of fully addressing the “difficult knowledges” (Britzman, 1998) of AIDS, the tensions between public rhetorics that must necessarily be insufficient to what they attempt to address and the affective histories that these public rhetorics may gesture toward but never fully contain. Key to the work AIDS activism has had to do is to map the tensions between the psychic and political economies of AIDS, and to collapse the distinctions presumed between “privatized affective responses” and collective and political responses, so that, in the words of Ann Cvetkovich (2003, p.10), “affective life can be seen to pervade public life.”  AIDS activisms have had the ominous task of translating privatized affective responses into collective political ones, of turning mourning into militancy as Douglas Crimp (1989) once wrote, or in the words of Shoshana Felman (Felman & Laub, 2002, p.124) this time, of learning the “process of translation of thousands of private, secret traumas into one collective, public, and communally acknowledged one.”  Privatized affective responses continue to mingle with collective political responses in addresses to and from AIDS.

            My focus on the traumatic memories of AIDS activism in North America is not intended to hypostatize the queer response to AIDS or to suggest gay organizing around AIDS provides a model to be followed, nor is it intended to act as another sort of refusal of the information of AIDS as a crisis that illustrates how epidemic disease serves to exacerbate various sorts of social inequality and the hatreds they obscure; racisms and sexisms, and also colonial and class violences. That is to say, I do not subscribe to a writing of the history of AIDS that prioritizes queer experience at the expense of others who are, in such a narrative, considered expendable, unnecessary. Such a history would simply be a repetition of a tragic material history that has denied the psychical and physical suffering of millions of people. For those living with AIDS in the so-called developing world and for those who experience HIV and AIDS alongside other traumas, such as poverty and homelessness, traumas accumulate and, as Eric Rofes (1998) has argued in Dry Bones Breathe, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to separate out AIDS as a site of traumatic insistence apart from other equally insistent violences (Rofes, 1998). Just where the “crisis” is today can be difficult to discern.

            By mapping the traumatic history of queer responses to AIDS and of activist rhetorics which have served to address the pandemic, it is my aim to look to the ways that these responses and rhetorics have helped to shape queer politicality, and to provide the tools for thinking about the fault-lines of liberal-democracy as it pertains to queer identities and pedagogies. While it appears that many believe the AIDS crisis to be “over” –over there but not here, or over and done with for us, now—I look to the traumatic repetition of the crisis as instructive when thinking of the exhaustion of various publics and their persistent refusals to be implicated in the information of AIDS. These refusals within various queer publics are still the stuff of activist addresses, as the recent AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) campaigns, which include the hailing of community in the “Welcome to Condom Country” campaign which addressed the rise of bare backing and the simultaneous rise of HIV-seropositivity in Toronto's gay community in the late 1990s, or in the current (2004- )  “How Do You Know What You Know (Assumptions)” campaign, show. Created in response to increasing infection rates as an addresses to men who have sex with men, the ACT campaigns encourages various queer community members to think beyond assumptions that the information of HIV and AIDS no longer pertains to them. The activist rhetorics and queer politicality about which I write in historical context in this article and largely with reference to the history of ACT-UP persist in AIDS education campaigns and activisms. Furthermore, the refusal of information of AIDS is also just as pertinent when thinking about refusals of the information of AIDS in Africa or Asia, or about the information of AIDS in inner-city North America, or for those who experience the layering of trauma through multiple sites of structural and systemic violence.

In this paper, I consider two movements of address that recur in the theorization of AIDS. These two directions are embodied in the general question that numerous theorizations of AIDS have attempted to address: Who or what is the subject of AIDS? More than two decades of AIDS activism have addressed the larger social disavowal of the pandemic. While focusing on the need for adequate health care, funding of medical research, campaigns for safer sex and AIDS prevention, and the equitable and economical distribution of palliative drugs not only in North America but around the world, this form of activism has also had to address the social hatred of queers, of the marginal, and so on. It has also had to address the complex psychical strategies used to isolate the information of AIDS, to disavow implication in the pandemic. The strategies include the many ways the end of AIDS has been declared, the ways AIDS is assumed to be over, to be over and done, a remnant of history, or to be differently over, over there, away, a problem for ever distant others. The heterogeneous populations of people who somehow imagine themselves to be outside AIDS have been, and continue to be, the addressees of this activism. Within AIDS activism another sort of intelligibility is also at stake, however. This has to do with the problems that the very forms of mobilizing for politicality pose in their dependence on a subjectivity presumed to know.

In mapping the tensions between the psychic and political economies of AIDS, I will suggest how thinking on trauma and mourning can supplement critiques of the ideational supports of liberal democracies. I argue most centrally that AIDS activism, in its need to account for trauma and mourning, has demanded a rethinking of the grounds of politicality while at the same time demanding a sustained thinking about the stakes of identities and communities as they are prevalently understood. AIDS activism shows the limits and liabilities of identity politics and assumptions of community. At the same time, AIDS discourses challenge thinking on trauma and the stakes of producing survivable subjectivities in significant ways.

There has been a persistent idea in AIDS activist discourse, and this is that the subject needs to be re-imagined, reinstated or replaced altogether. This may come as no surprise from a theoretical standpoint, but from a political-activist standpoint this claim can be troubling. If trauma reveals the tenuous constitution of the self, its fragmentation, dissolution or disillusionment in the aftermath of the extreme experience, and if mourning is a work that is always stymied by that for which it cannot account but nonetheless needs to be abjected in order for the ego to be returned to some semblance of propriety, then both trauma and mourning require consideration of what is said to ground the self, its self-perceptions and understandings of the worlds of its experience. Further, if the questioning of the subject by trauma and mourning is to be turned into something else in afterthought (Ironstone-Catterall, 2001), then the challenges to the grounds of subjectivity that find their articulation in political and social critique also need to be addressed. That is to say, if subjectivity and the ways in which it comes to be articulated have become the basis for numerous critiques that have found widespread currency, then these critiques also need to be accounted for in AIDS discourses. Insofar as AIDS continues to demand the formulation of modes of address and redress in order to mitigate its affects, then attempts to speak to or from AIDS in politically expedient ways -- meaning the ways demanded of a liberal-democratic or neoliberal politicality -- must simultaneously address the limits and liabilities of liberal-democratic assumptions about subjectivity and identity in so doing. At the same time, however, and equally problematic for the construction of a politically expedient subjectivity, the traumatic affects of AIDS may be said to provide an immanent critique of the grounds of subjectivity and of notions of identity and community that are premised on it.

Informed by Wendy Brown’s (1993) still salient critique of liberal-democratic assumptions about who can engage politics in meaningful ways, how this engagement is to take place and with what problematic effects, I consider how AIDS-activist discourse has challenged the premises of institutionalized forms of political engagement while concurrently and necessarily working with its expectations. This double gesture, this activism that works both within and outside institutionalized modalities of politicality, may suggest alternative frameworks for politicized forms of address. Rethinking the terms of engagement is necessary, particularly if we are to take seriously both the critiques of liberal-democratic politicality and the immanent critique of subjectivity and identity in trauma. Central to this is not only a retooling of the grounds of politicality in subjectivity and identity—a task that has been attempted many times before with varying degrees of success—but also the refashioning of activism in order that it might be able to speak to and from the traumas and losses at the heart of responses to AIDS. This refashioning may include a problematization of the grounds of identity and community so that these may, in turn, become the basis for a practice aimed at transforming the conditions that contribute to and make possible oppression and the physical and psychical forms of violence at the core of both enfranchisement and disenfranchisement in liberal democracies. This is a queer project, to be sure.

What have been declared to be crises of subjectivity, of identity, and of community in the wake of the AIDS pandemic have created particular challenges for activist discourse insofar as these concepts ground assumptions about why, when, how, and who may seek out and effect political change. That is to say, AIDS activism has had to attend to three different but associated questions, all of which point to the central difficulty of making action possible. In the words of Alexander García Düttmann (1996, p. 48-49):

There is the question of the who, concerning addressees of thinking and talking about AIDS. There is the question of the what, concerning what happens in thinking and talking about AIDS. And finally there is the question of how, concerning the possibility of thinking and talking about AIDS at all. Of course, these questions become meaningful only because they emerge from practical political experience and because they are directed toward making powerful and effective action possible. Thinking and talking about AIDS cannot be detached from the context of practical politics.

In North America, assumptions about the who, what and how of political address, while troubled by many people from different ends of the political spectrum, still frame addresses to and from AIDS insofar as they form the basis for institutionalized politicality, and thereby dictate to a greater or lesser degree the strategies of engagement that will be entertained by political institutions.^[1] These are questions of rhetoric, but not rhetorical questions.

These strategies^[2] frame the terms of political discussion in ways that serve to delimit what may and may not be said, how and under what conditions this saying is to take place, and who as representative of whom is sufficiently sanctioned to make claims and seek compensation or redress. Political institutions, be they juridical, educational, biomedical, or beyond, frame the articulation of demands in specific, fairly rigidly defined, even if highly problematic, modes of address. That not everyone has access to the means for articulating their demands is a common concern in critiques of liberal-democratic governmentality. These critiques suggest that two central problems with securing access to these means are the exclusive and exclusionary production of a political subjectivity premised on assumptions of individualism, and the paradoxes of an identity politics understood as the mediation between individual subjects and the universalizing totality that is assumed to be the foundation for the collective.

Discussing liberalism’s limits and liabilities, Brown (1993) suggests that oppositional practices aimed at mitigating the perceived physical or psychical injuries of exclusionary politics face a number of dilemmas. Beginning with the question of how it is one may engage politics in meaningful ways when one does not recognize oneself or is not recognized in the construction of liberal-democratic subjectivity or if one is not the white, male, middle-class, heterosexual that is the imagined ideal subject, Brown argues that contemporary identity politics offers both the promise of effecting change and the danger of reproducing structures of oppression and exclusion. Politicized identity contests the terms of liberal discourse by challenging its universal “we” by showing it to be a strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups, and also asserting that the “I” of liberalism is social rather than essential. At the same time, however, “it reinstates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified “I” that is disenfranchized by an exclusive “we”” (Brown, 1993, p. 64-65).

In contesting the terms of liberal humanist universality—the exclusive “we”—politicized identity posits itself as excluded from the whole, as disenfranchized. In so doing, however, politicized identity reproduces the equally troubling postulate of the political subject as presumably “sovereign” and “unified.” While contesting the grounds of liberalism, therefore, the politicized identity at the ground of identity politics threatens to reiterate the exclusionary gestures of this supposedly universalizing politicality by framing its address to it in the form of an identity whose basis is exclusion:

politicized identity emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion: a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that thus reinstalls the humanist ideal—and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal—insofar as it premises itself upon exclusion from it (Brown, 1993, p. 65).

Identity politics, wittingly or not, reproduces and serves to further cement the ideal insofar as it is necessary to the construction of oppositional identities that are premised on exclusion from it.

A stark example of this reiteration of the ideal of sovereign subjectivity and inclusion, and its double-edged sword, may be found, according to Brown (1993), in the discourse of rights. Premised on the idea that there is a generic personhood that may be accounted for by conferring individual rights, this discourse operates as though rights were an ahistorical, acultural, and acontextual idiom: “they claim distance from specific political contexts and historical vicissitudes, and they necessarily participate in a discourse of enduring universality rather than provisionality and partiality” (Brown, 1993, p. 97). Once recognized, rights may initially be a force that emancipates individuals, but they may also be used to regulate them.  Further tying individuals to their identities, rights discourses may also serve to obstruct or co-opt radical political demands by dissolving the excluded “we” that may be politicized into individuals who are then depoliticized. In Brown’s (1993, p. 98) words, it is ironic “that rights sought by a politically defined group are conferred upon depoliticized individuals.” The universalizing gestures of generic personhood in the discourse of rights paradoxically serve to individualize and particularlize. In turn, this particularization further ties the individual to herself as rights become a means of regulating and administrating differences in the political field, a point that might be brought to bear on the question of gay marriage as much as on other, broader questions of rights in the third decade of the “age of AIDS.”

The discourse of rights serves as a form of disciplinary power that is “extraordinarily effective in “colonizing” allegedly free subjects; for example, those highly individuated, self-interested subjects produced by liberal cultures and capitalist political economies. These turn out to be the subjects quintessentially susceptible to disciplinary power: their individuation and false autonomy is also their vulnerability” (Brown, 1993, p. 19). In this way, vulnerability is further reinforced rather than mitigated insofar as “a certain injury-forming identity discursively entrenches the injury-identity connection it denounces” (Brown, 1993, p. 21). One of the significant effects of this is that the consolidation of identity and injury operates within political discourse, not simply to emancipate those who are or perceive themselves to be injured, but also further facilitates the binding of them to their injury, both as a means of self-understanding and of recognition within liberal-democratic politicality. And this consolidation of injury and identity struggles to distinguish itself in a competition among addressees from numerous citizen-victims in the public sphere. In the words of Lauren Berlant (1997, pp. 1-2),

This coupling of suffering and citizenship is so startling and so moving because it reveals about national power both its impersonality and its intimacy. The experience of social hierarchy is intensely individuating, yet it also makes people public and generic: it turns them into kinds of people who are both attached to and underdescribed by the identities that organize them. This paradox of partial legibility is behind much of the political and personal anger that arises in scenes of misrecognition in everyday life—at work, on the street, at home, under the law, and even in aesthetic experience.

This binding of the self to itself, this “paradox of partial legibility,” becomes the basis for a problematic form of political expression that Brown (1993, p. 27) calls the “politics of ressentiment.” Ressentment, which describes a generalized and chronic feeling of resentment or  hostility harbored by one individual or group against another that often has no means of direct expression, informs a competitive and pervasive public rhetoric of citizen trauma in which pain can be turned into a banality, everyday because ubiquitous.  The critique of power from the perspective of the injured is developed within the “politics of ressentiment” in such a way as to delimit a specific site for the pain of social subordination and to fix the identities of injured and injury in social positions (Brown, 1993, p. 27). Simultaneously, however, it also codifies the meanings of actions against any kind of struggle for resignification, rendering the indeterminate and ambiguous in social positions determinate and rigid.

The fixing of the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions in this political practice serves a monologic function according to which addresses take on specific and inflexible meanings—meanings that may or may not be shared by other members of the identity group or by those to and for whom they claim to speak—and serves to delimit the horizon of possible actions that may be taken by their constituents. Functioning to both separate the group from its others and to mark out separations within the group itself, the fixing of the injured identity in effect also fixes an economy of blame that has punishment and retribution at its heart.

In fixing identities, the politics of ressentiment cements the injury to the identity and forecloses the possibility of addressing indeterminacy and ambiguity in political positions. It also curtails any attempts to speak about injury or the injured in alternative ways, ways that might not suffer as easily the danger of identity’s essentialisms. As Brown (1993, p. 70-71) writes:

Politicized identity, premised on exclusion and fueled by humiliation and suffering imposed by its historically structured impotence in the context of a discourse of sovereign individuals, is as likely to seek generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impotence, as it is to seek its own collective liberation through empowerment. Indeed, it is more likely to punish and reproach... than to find venues of self-affirming action.

That venues for self-affirming action are foreclosed in this articulation of identity politics is, in part, a result of the re-inscription of the liberal subject at the juncture of accountability and impotence. As a consequence, the liberal subject, as it is articulated here, has all of the responsibility to effect change, and has meted out responsibility for its injury, but is as a result so atomized and individuated that it has little power to make change possible, to the degree that “the late modern liberal subject quite literally seethes with ressentiment” (Brown, 1993, p. 69).

Larry Kramer (1989, p. 162) seemed to recognize his ressentiment all too well in “I Can’t Believe You Want to Die,” an address he delivered as a “farewell speech” (it was not his last talk about AIDS although he claims to have been determined this would be the case) in Boston in the summer of 1987. He opened this talk, “the angriest speech I ever delivered” (Kramer 1989, p. 175), in this way:

We have little to be proud of this Gay Pride Week.

One by one, we are being picked off by the enemy.

They are killing us.

I don’t think you are going to like what I am going to say. It is the last time I am going to say it. I’m making a farewell appearance. I am not overly tired. I am certainly not suffering from burnout. I have a lot of piss and vinegar left in me --too much, in fact. No, I’m not tired....

I’m telling you they are killing us. We are being picked off one by one... and you are still sitting on your asses like weaklings, and therefore we, the gay community, are not strong enough and our organizations are not strong enough and we are going to die for it!

I have come to the terrible realization that I believe this gay community of ours has a death wish and that we are going to die because we refuse to take responsibility for our own lives....

I’m tired of you, by your own passivity, actively participating in your own genocide (Kramer, 1989, pp. 162-163).

This castigation, borne silently by his audience as we are told in Kramer’s recollection of it, shows his anger and frustration with the gay community while also illustrating how this turns on a two-directional economy of blame. The gay community is being killed by an enemy that is not being stopped by a host of people, government agents and researchers, that constitute the nefarious “they” who are killing “us.” But, in this rhetorical framing, their refusal to acknowledge AIDS in meaningful ways is echoed by constituents of the gay community as they refuse to be implicated in the information of AIDS and refuse to recognize that they, too, are dying. Kramer calls this the “passivity” of the gay community in the face of its own devastation, an indictment that turns on the double-edged sword of narcissism: narcissism as the basis of presumed identity in and with the epidemic and as an insular individualism that precludes awareness of one’s own participation in one’s own “genocide.” These are fighting words, to be sure. But they are hinged in large part on a prescription for action -- how best to confront the epidemic -- that does not recognize its own implication in the selfsame economies of blame that posited gay men, their behaviours and actions, as the “source” of AIDS in America.

Lee Edelman (1993, p. 27), in his response to this positioning of activist rhetoric called “The Mirror and the Tank,” stated that activist presumptions of having left the “mirror,” of being able to do away with narcissism, are dubious insofar as even the activist identity finds its anchors there:

it is never, in any event, a question of leaving the mirror. It is a question, rather, of which mirror we choose to reflect the image we will recognize as ours: whether, that is, on the one hand, in our defense of an already beleaguered gay identity, we want to emulate the widespread heterosexual contempt for the image of a gay sexuality represented as passive and narcissistic in order to embrace, as our new mirror image, the power of the tanks beneath which we would lie; or whether, on the other hand, we want to refuse the “choice” ideologically imposed by such a binarism -- whether we want to deny the incompatibility of passivity and power, and thereby to undertake the construction of a gay subjectivity that need not define itself against its own subset of demonized “faggots.”

If it is not a question of leaving the mirror to lie under the tank, but rather of integrating the mirror’s identity positions into the same frame as the tank, then the rhetorics which emerge out identity positions, be they strategic positions or otherwise, must be attentive not to reproduce the kinds of oppositions they seek to oppose, as the case of “I Can’t Believe You Want to Die” shows. If queer identity politics simply reproduces the structures of exclusion that form the ground for liberal-democracy, then it impales itself on the stake of its own oppression, and is endlessly open to the same sorts of criticisms that it leveled at, say, governmental organizations that refused to recognize AIDS as a problem outside the curious demands made by individuals who took on the identity of “AIDS activist.” This stance, Edelman suggests, serves only to recreate the same sorts of exclusions it wishes to contest even if it arises as a traumatic response and is a repetition of the injuries of exclusion.

Nancy Stoller (1998) discussed the problem of exclusion at length in her book Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS. She shows how initial attempts to mobilize large numbers of people in groups like ACT-UP (New York) unwittingly served to reinforce risk-group designations and to highlight rather than mitigate separations between different groups of people most affected by AIDS. One way that structural exclusions were shown, even with its “ultra-democratic” structure, she argues, was in ACT-UP’s limited leadership, which was “predominantly well-educated, white, and gay” (Stoller, 1998, p. 113), and in the graphic design output of the Gran Fury Collective, its graphics affinity group, whose most familiar image is “Silence=Death.” As Stoller (1998, p. 128) writes, “Representational issues affected ACT-UP not only in relationship to minority and poor populations, but also in terms of women.” One example of the complications of implicit sexism and of efforts to address it was the Gran Fury poster designed for the women’s focus day of the Nine Days of Action in 1988. The poster, called “Sexism Rears its Unprotected Head,” is described as “a monumentally erect penis surrounded by three slogans,” which was “received with marked ambivalence by some members of ACT-UP, especially by several women who felt the graphic glorified phallic power more forcefully than it encouraged safer sex” (Stoller 1998, p. 128). Stoller argues that the most effective and strongest of the graphic designs produced by this ACT-UP affinity group focus on “male, gay, and white issues” while African Americans, Latinos, women, and the poor, many of whom are now disproportionately effected by HIV and AIDS, were less centrally or successfully represented in the materials produced by it. One significant effect of this was to further entrench the injury-identity complex which holds gay identity and AIDS together. The strength and force of ACT-UP actions (or “zaps”) and graphics campaigns also reinforced the associative force of AIDS with gay identity by attempting to adequately represent, speak to or for this identity group. Indeed, even attempts to wrench the injury from the identity in more or less theoretical discussions, as many, including Edelman, have attempted, served the primary role of further entrenching their ideational confluence.

 In reinscribing exclusion, activist discourses fail to recognize the possibilities for reshaping and repoliticizing subjectivity itself:

“AIDS”... can be figured as a crisis in -- and hence an opportunity for -- the social shaping or articulation of subjectivities because, in part, the historical context within which “AIDS” in the West achieved its “identity” allowed it to be presented as a syndrome distinctively engaging identity as an issue. In fact, whatever the direction from which we approach the subject of “AIDS,” we are brought up against our own constitution as subjects of (and in) ideology and the fact that we are forced to recognize that the politics of “AIDS” as a subject of discourse is inseparable, that is, from the ideological construction of the cultural fantasmatics of agency. (Edelman, 1993, p. 12-13)

The identity of AIDS has shifted dramatically since the advent of AIDS activism in the gay community. However, the lessons of AIDS activism as articulated in organizations such as ACT-UP have show that it is not a question of abandoning the subject-positions proffered by identity, for this option is already closed off by the continuing interpretation of AIDS as “belonging” to particular identity groups.^[3] Nor is it a matter of simply asserting that a queer subject-position “can be exempted from ideological consequences -- and the historical returns or repetitions -- of its constitution within the dominant culture” (Edelman, 1993, p. 28), for “we must recognize that “our” “activist” discourse is only a mutation of  “their” “master discourses” and that its effect on them, though certain, is always unpredictable” (Edelman, 1993, p. 29). This is the ambivalence of the subject that is central to Judith Butler’s (1997) meditation in The Psychic Life of Power. Rather, it is a question of taking on the challenge to identity and subjectivity that the “AIDS crisis” has demanded, and to be wary of the tendency to recapitulate the logic in which queers are dismissed as non-subjects, for “we have the chance to displace that logic and to begin to articulate the range of options for what might become a postmodern subject” (Edelman, 1993, p. 28). This becoming is, according to Edelman, dependent on the critique of the white, middle-class, male, heterosexual ideal of liberal-democracies that may facilitate developing and articulating alternative notions of subjectivity in politicality.

Brown suggests a way to imagine a politicality that does not simply reiterate the dangers of identity politics and its ontological and ultimately essentializing claims. By reframing the politics of identity in a politics of desire, she argues, claims of desire or “I want...” may serve to undo the fixing power of identity claims based on an essentializing “I am....” Replacing the language of “being” with a language of “wanting” serves, according to Brown, to side-step the demand to oppose or seek to transcend identity investments and to politically recover the moment prior to identity’s own foreclosure against want, prior to the point at which “sovereign subjectivity” is established through such a foreclosure and “through the eternal repetition of its pain” (Brown, 1993, p. 76). Although the language with which Brown presents this notion may appear to suggest the recuperation a lost position, a nostalgic recollection of a lost political moment when injury had not yet been co-opted and institutionalized in sometimes damning ways, this should not detract from the interesting challenge and promise the politics of desire may present for political practice. I would suggest that the history of queer AIDS activism, in its attempt to procure rights and material support for the HIV positive while simultaneously politicizing queer identities and working to sever the problematic consolidation of injury and identity (for example, the equation in which AIDS continues to be seen as a disease “belonging” to gay men even while its dominant epidemiological identity has shifted to overwhelming include other marginal groups, including urban Hispanic and African-Americans and those geographically defined under the umbrella which serves at one and the same time to homogenize and to obscure “Africa”), demonstrates both the advantages and the liabilities of a political discourse that uses both identity claims and claims of desire in an effort to address loss and trauma and to achieve social and political change.

I would make the provisional claim here that Brown’s (1993) suggestion that the politics of desire may provide an alternative mode of political practice and address needs to be supplemented by consideration of the relationship between injury and trauma and the manner in which loss is engaged in a work of activism understood as simultaneously being a work of mourning. That is to say, insofar as AIDS may still be said to precipitate trauma and necessitate an interminable work of mourning, how can these become the basis for a politicality that speaks from positions of identity and claims of desire? AIDS activism has had to address the problems of further entangling the injured individual to herself and of binding this self to an identity that has been excluded from the political currencies of liberal-humanist subjectivity. But it has also had to address the traumatic affects of AIDS which, on an individual level, mark a fragmentation of the self, and, on the level of communities, highlight the fault lines and incommensurable differences at the heart of every claim to identity.

The immanent critique of subjectivity that is given over to thought with AIDS shows how trauma can doubly challenge the subject, first in its challenge to the assumptions of autonomy and self-mastery at the heart of the liberal fiction of individualism, and then in the recognition of the exclusive and exclusionary gestures of constructions of community and nations. But, insofar as trauma marks a fragmentation of the self in the traumatic experience and in subsequent attempts to reorganize the contents of this experience so that it might be or become manageable in and by a politically expedient subjectivity, trauma insistently destabilizes identity claims and any politicality grounded on them. If the self is fragmented and disentangled from an identity that no longer appears to be viable, and if the repetition and mitigation of the traumatic injury has been the basis of queer AIDS activism, then any queer politicality that continues to address AIDS must necessarily understand the self and any identity attributed to it to be partial, provisional, and an inadequate representation of and for the incommensurability at its base. That this recognition has not always been made reflects the many ways in which the fictions of individualism and universalism permeate the political field and serve to frame political engagement. It also points to the manner in which what may initially be posited as provisional can, in its transfer to dominant political discourses, be refashioned by these discourses in such as way as to occlude any initial articulation of them as partial.

Insofar as liberal democracy demands political positioning -- recognizes identity claims over claims of desire -- taking on the political positions proffered by identity might well still be the only way to engage the political in ways that may lead to the recognition of injury and, subsequently, to the possibility of actualizing political change. As a tactical counter-point to the strategic (individualizing and particular even if still making claims to universality) demands of liberal democracies, adoption of a position under the injury-identity umbrella, provisionally and with an awareness of how these positions may become sedimented with time, has served the primary role of making oneself and one’s claims intelligible to the dominant political institutions. The secondary, and more problematic, effect of this tactical political positioning, however, may be to further entrench the identity and the injury in such a way as to limit and perhaps shrink the horizon of possible addresses to and from the identity position. The result of this, as Brown (1993) shows with relation to various brands of feminism in the United States, is to embed in ways that are not always easy to undo assumptions about the connection of the injury to the identity, thereby once again making the injury essential to the identity position. It has been argued by many, Lee Edelman (1993) foremost among them, that even the efforts to disentangle AIDS from gay identity may well have catalyzed the opposite effect; the discursive attempt at uncoupling AIDS from any identity in these critiques serves only to hypostatize the injury-identity complex, while any apologia these critiques make for trying once again to unravel them does little to mitigate against the manner in which the proliferation of discussion on the AIDS’ gay male equation further imbricates rather than separates the two terms.

AIDS activists have managed to articulate a politics of desire that has, at times, opened up -- however tenuously -- venues for political action outside the limited bounds of identity politics. The continuing treatment-activist project, for example, of “getting drugs into people”^[4] which now focuses on making generic drugs available to those who would otherwise not be able to afford them shows how claims of “I want...” may be most suitable to effecting change in arenas that had not historically been seen as highly politically charged. The history of this project is instructive. In a series of actions aimed specifically at the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, ACT-UP waged a struggle not only to speed up drug-testing and provide access to research findings so that these might be weighed by those outside the medical profession, but also to alter the protocols for drug testing in order that drugs would get to people in a much more timely fashion. They argued, quite successfully at times, that these protocols needed to be changed in cases where a lethal epidemic was at issue. The strategies used by ACT-UP to “get drugs into people” in the North American context, are, as Benjamin Shepard (Shepard & Hayduk, 2002) has shown, being used in actions directed at the WTO in the struggle to make cheaper, generic drugs available to those who need them.

On the one hand, this example of the politics of desire--“I want... access to drugs” -- served to make available treatments that were in initial stages of testing, albeit mainly in the form of double-blind trials, a practice that may be criticized on many levels, including refusing fatally ill test subjects potentially helpful treatments in the name of “scientific objectivity.” On the other hand, this example shows how the politics of desire must also be careful in what it wishes for. Sometimes getting what one wants can create a situation as or even more dire. As John Erni (1994) showed in his study of the history of AZT -- for a long time the only treatment for AIDS that showed any real signs of promise -- quick access to drugs can mean even more protracted suffering as toxic drugs combine with grave illness to make matters worse. And, as Erni’s (1994) study illustrates, drugs are not, by dint of being “wanted,” somehow immune to the political workings of institutions and, particularly, pharmaceutical corporations and the imperatives operative in them. The initial promise of AZT seemed to warrant a monopoly on treatment options -- putting all the treatment eggs in the AZT basket, as it were -- limiting for many years treatment options and research on other possible treatments. With such a monopoly, AZT cornered the AIDS-treatment market, and, as a result, exorbitant amounts may still be charged for the drug. The prohibitive cost of treatment meant for many that drugs would remain unavailable to them. The cost issue is still a relevant one; despite now somewhat less promising results for some, drugs remain largely unavailable because unaffordable.

Effective treatment continues to come at a cost. The result of this is that large numbers of people continue to die without any treatment whatsoever even if, in the so-called Western world, the medical repertoire for dealing with HIV and palliatives for the opportunistic infections of AIDS have expanded. Indeed, AIDS treatment not only shows the unequal distribution of epistemological wealth to the so-called Third World but also demonstrates how people in the so-called First World continue to be separated by matters all-too-material. Access to drugs in the United States, for example, is not universal as long as poor, inner-city dwellers, so disproportionately affected by HIV infection, do not have access to costly treatments. While HIV is a most democratic virus in that it knows no boundaries of race, class, sexuality, nation states, or otherwise, treatment shows itself to be considerably less than democratically distributed, even within liberal-democratic states.

The politics of desire, while creating the possibility of alternative modes of political address, does not, as the example of historical articulations of queer AIDS activism has shown, thereby side-step the pitfalls experienced by identity politics. Nor has it been, as an alternative expression of politicality, somehow immune from being incorporated into existing political discourses in ways that will distort it. As a tactical intervention into the strategic workings of complex political discourses, a politics of desire may function at times to alter the political terrain, but it may not always be said to do so in permanent or seemingly positive ways.  And, as the continued struggle to achieve political identity shows, the politics of identity, in being admixed with the claims of desire, does not cease to hold currency once it has been inflected by the alternative modes of address desire makes it possible to articulate. 

Identity remains an issue in AIDS-activist discourse. This is not only to the degree that identity has been deployed sometimes quite successfully in, for example, a rights discourse that aims to legally protect the HIV-positive individual from certain types of discrimination, but also to the degree that claims of identity -- for example the construction of the Person Living With AIDS in the Denver Proclamation of the 1980s -- have serve to counter dominant perceptions of what it means to be HIV-positive or “have AIDS.” Similarly, as years of research on AIDS education and prevention have shown, the question of identity and identification is key to communicating the information of AIDS.  People must be able to recognize themselves in educational materials, to be addressed by the information they contain, even if these moments of recognition are few and far between.  Nonetheless, further consideration of the question of identity is necessary, especially if it is to account for the trauma and loss at the heart of both avowals and disavowals of identity in AIDS that are both current and part of recent memory.

The thought of trauma gives over to the thought of identity politics understood as a politicization of injury its limit, for identity is called into question in sometimes radical ways in the traumatic experience. But it also provides alternative ways of thinking about what it means to assume a politically expedient if tenuously grounded subjectivity. If trauma (and political activity attempting to mitigate its affects) perpetually calls into question this subjectivity through its repetitions and defies efforts to put into conventional rhetorical forms the meanings of the injury at its base, then it simultaneously returns to trouble the horizon of possible addresses that are sent, received, or for which we may be account in queer discourse and politicality.

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