ABSTRACT
These two quotes frame the following discussion of contemporary HIV politics in three ways. First, they underscore how much contemporary gay and lesbian political organising is focused on issues of marriage and the family, and, thus, they are suggestive of a troubling silence about the status of HIV/AIDS (‘isn’t that a South East Asian/African disease now?’). The second frame these extracts provide my discussion concerns the kinds of politics each invoke. The first quote is a liberal invocation of normalcy, a kind of non-queer benignity where gays and lesbians underscore their significant contributions to hegemonic projects of national domesticity (what Lisa Duggan (2002) calls ‘the new homonormativity’); whereas the second promotes a queer politics of deviance, a radical politics of subversion and an angry celebration of abnormality. These two framings are obvious enough, of course, so in this chapter, I draw on the provocative work of Lee Edelman (2004) to suggest the need for a third and even queerer frame that uses the opposition between rhetorical figures of ‘The Child’ haunting both quotations and the queer figure of HIV+ bodyspace (the living-dead that William Harver (1996) calls the space of future AIDS corpses). This opposition between The Child and the queer, as Edelman stresses, serves to frame ‘The Political’ in terms of life/death, the world with a future/ the world without a future, the worthy/the unworthy, innocence/evil. In other words, I am interested in the opposition between the image of the happy and healthy child lurking on the side of liberal gay and lesbian politics of homonormativity (in whose
name the future of the nation is assured) and that of the space of the HIV+ body, a figure overdetermined by its subjection to a lack of futurity and therefore excluded a priori from the promise of the future afforded by The Child.
