ABSTRACT
For the sake of humane understanding, let us start by doing a thoroughly disparaged, increasingly shocking, and totally inhumane act. Let us reify the human family into a set of elements. Then, for the AIDS epidemic, there is only one boundary, one Peano curve separating the inside from the outside, one circle to the Venn diagram defining the set of the human family. We are all ‘inside’, all potentially ‘at risk’, because the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) respects no one. Then, within that boundary, within that set of reified ‘us’, equivalence relations may partition the set into non-overlapping subsets. The elements of the human family divide; their intersections are null. As long as the partitions are maintained, the HIV is confined to infected elements capable of transmitting HIV only to others within the same subset. Thus, this abstract, reifying approach immediately centres our attention on barriers, those null sets of intersections, those breaks in the connective tissue, that tear apart the backcloth structure, and so produce the obstructions required to prevent the transmission of an HIV traffic. Bounds, those noman’s-lands of null intersections, are barriers, and barriers are bounds-from the human skin to international regulations, from the latex membrane of a condom to the walls of a quarantined hospital. Geographers acknowledge that processes appear at many spatial scales, and eventually we shall have to write the ‘geographies’ of the HIV and cell, the human body, and all of the human groups and institutions involved in a worldwide pandemic. All are made up of sets of elements ultimately influenced and structured by human relations-sexual, addictive, marital, medical, powerful, institutional, bureaucratic, governmental…many relations structure the human family, and so make and break structures upon which the HIV can travel.
