ABSTRACT
As part of an attempt to situate the AIDS epidemic historically and culturally, much of my work is devoted to making sense of the discursive association between homosexuality and pathology over the past one hundred years or so. I am concerned with what the confluence of these two terms—homosexuality and pathology—means for the construction of queer subjectivities, particularly in the United States now, at the end of a century and of a millennium. 1 My method is to examine critically medical and scientific projects designed to gain epistemological and social control over homosexuality. I do not presume that one can do this effectively by focusing on scientific practices and discourses alone. Instead, my method is to read scientific practices as both embedded in and expressive of culturally and historically specific conditions. In short, I presume science to be situated always among competing meanings and explanations, and never to be in a domain free from political, economic, and cultural processes. For many readers, I am sure, understanding science as culture and in culture is a first premise, or a given of any intelligent analysis of scientific knowledge. Likewise, the notion that science is both embedded in and constitutive of dynamics of social power is by now beyond question, even (or especially) from the perspectives of many scientists themselves. But demonstrating these points seems important now, at a time when the magical signs of rationality, objectivity, and scientific authority continue to shape the terms by which we imagine ourselves, our bodies, and the environments we occupy.
