ABSTRACT
In AIDS and the Body Politic Catherine Waldby condenses nearly two decades of writing on AIDS and the body into a study of how biomedicine constructs itself as a master discourse, able to speak for the health of the body politic because it alone can ‘visualize’ and thus potentially eradicate the disease. This ambitious and timely study documents the ways in which biomedical discourse and its various technologies operate as regulatory mechanisms in the maintenance of a phallocentric status quo, one in which the white, heterosexual ‘male’ body, despite its actual risk status, serves as the model for the ‘healthy’ body politic. Building upon Mary Douglas's work in Purity and Danger, Waldby argues that where bio-medicine is concerned the ideal body is ‘an immunologically perfect body without orifices, whose individuality cannot be compromised, the body which neither takes nor gives infection’ (p. 13). Biomedicine's continual, if implicit, reference to this phallic ideal in its construction of ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’ effectively works to exclude certain bodies from medical representation and thus to seriously impact future directions in AIDS research. To make this point, Waldby rehearses many of the crucial arguments made by AIDS theorists and cultural critics over the last fifteen years or so, as a means of illustrating the persistence of this imaginary phallicized body in the biomedical imagination, and its normativizing force as a metaphor for the ideal social order, one which contains itself against the threat of polluting forces through strategies of medical governance.
