ABSTRACT
AIDS has become, to borrow a phrase, an ‘incredibly powerful semantic constellation’ (Esteva, 1993) whose symbols both record and are used as instruments in continuing struggles between unequally powerful actors. A battleground for different conceptions of morality, representations of AIDS also reflect assumptions concerning disease and illness across diverse cultures. In global discourses on AIDS, biomedical language and assumptions trump those of other actors, privileging clinical definitions of AIDS over other ways of representing the disease. Yet AIDS is clearly as expressive of social and cultural facts as it is of biological ones. Its symptoms and progression can be related to interactions between the individual body, the social body and the body politic, for ‘Sickness is not just an isolated event or an unfortunate brush with nature. It is a form of communication-the language of the organs-through which nature, society and culture speak simultaneously (Lock and Scheper-Hughes, 1990, p. 71). Since the language of body organs requires interpretation in order to render it therapeutically intelligible, the question then becomes ‘in whose words [will] the body speak?’ (Treichler, 1992a, p. 75). The struggle to speak for the bodies of those affected by AIDS defines a ‘global culture of AIDS’ which, some would argue, implicitly assumes that ‘the cultural practices and beliefs of countries are not all that different’ (Herdt, 1992, p. 8) and, therefore, the AIDS pandemic is amenable to professional management and ultimate control.
