ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the way that seropositive and non-seropositive subjects describe the illness and how they read the corporeality of the HIV positive body. It intends to show the HIV positive body is narrativized in a series of literary texts from Hispano-America. Since AIDS has not been imagined in the collective consciousness as an individual's problem but as a form of collective disease, AIDS literature never truly provides successful mourning as the loss by AIDS is always rendered as one that precedes more imminent future deaths. As a result, the imagined readership of AIDS literature knows full well that the narrativization of AIDS in literature does not constitute the retelling of a single experience, but rather another account among many of how seropositive subjectivities are manifested and seropositive subjects deal with the illness. The association between AIDS and death becomes all the more evident in the novel.