Bersani and Nunokawa: AIDS and theory in the '80s

In 1986, a Los Angeles Times Magazine article, "AIDS: 1991," imagined what a Presidential Report on AIDS might sound like five years into the future:

The report calls for mandatory AIDS virus testing of every U.S. resident. Everybody will have to carry a photo identification card describing his or her test results. Those who are infected will be barred by law from having sex with uninfected people. Anyone found to have spread the infection will be jailed. Sex outside of marriage will be outlawed. Sodomy laws will be reinstated. If an infected woman becomes pregnant, she will be forced to have an abortion. Everyone entering the country--businessmen, tourists and Americans living abroad--will be quarantined for two weeks and then tested for the virus. All Americans will be tested for intravenous drugs, and drug users will be forced into treatment programs or jailed. 

To many, it seems that George Orwell's dark vision of a pervasively monitored society has arrived seven years later than he predicted. It appears that the nation is quickly becoming a society at the mercy of AIDS, divided between those who are infected and those fearing infection. The whole world is beginning to consider the United States a diseased country.

This seems hard to take seriously now, more akin to the latest zombie thriller than to serious journalism, but it captures the alarm, even paranoia, that was the trope nearest at hand for even some well-meaning writers at the time. "AIDS: 1991" was written by Neal Schram, a physician and the head of an LA AIDS task force, and he identifies as a primary cause of the nightmare to come the "general public['s] ... years of denying that this 'gay plague' could affect them."

Schram's intent, it seems fair to say, is to shock the general public, and the government organizations and media responsible for communicating about the disease, out of their state of denial so that more urgent action can be taken in the present. It's remarkable, though, that the scenario imagines the public not as outraged by a government that has failed to act, but as newly and radically vulnerable to subjection by the government: government-controlled sex, government-imposed abortions, quarantines, imprisonments. AIDS, here, is a site of power in Foucault's sense, a point of leverage that exerts force upon particular behaviors and populations, not at all limited to those suffering from the disease.

Simon Watney, writing about this article a year later in Policing Desire: Pornography, Aids, and the Media (1987), notes another disturbing feature that he sees as characteristic of AIDS journalism at the time: "What is so alarming, however, across the entire spectrum of printed commentary, is the inability to conceive of Aids [sic] in the present, as it is experienced world-wide by millions of people" (78, author's italics). The only way to provoke alarm about AIDS is to imagine how bad it's going to be--this is Schram's unstated premise. For those close to people already suffering from AIDS, which in the early '80s was concentrated particularly among gay men, that premise rather coarsely implied another: AIDS is going to be bad, but it's not so bad right now. (I don't wish to attribute that view to Schram, but it surely is the view towards which his rhetoric is pitched.)

ACT UP protestors in 1987, in New York City

In the U.S., government policy had seemed both to collude with and produce this lethal combination of prospective, ever-deferred alarm and present indifference. Reagan's secretary of education, William Bennett,  was prone to cruel moralizations of the disease -- ''With AIDS, harsh nature becomes the unwitting ally of responsible morality'' -- and resisted educating teens about AIDS or condoms; his insistence that abstinence education should be sufficient carried the erroneous--to some, lethal--implication that promiscuity rather than unsafe sex led to infection. (See Bersani's epigraph on this as well). In 1986, the Justice Department under Attorney General Edwin Meese refused to declare the firing of HIV-positive employees discriminatory (see Bersani, 7), and the Supreme Court ruled that anti-sodomy laws were constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick (a decision since overturned in Lawrence v. Texas). Just a year after the L.A. Times article, Republican Senator Jesse Helms began arguing for the quarantine of HIV-positive people, a tragedy that was replayed as farce in 2008 when a Republican senator tried to name an AIDS relief bill after Helms. 

It's against this political and cultural background that the world in which Bersani and Nunukawa write, in which middle-class Florideans set fire to the house of a family with HIV-positive hemopheliac children and Reagan administration officials like Edwin Meese appear not just homophobic but murderous, will make what sense it can.

Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (1987)

Leo Bersani

Bersani began his career as a professor of French literature -- his first book was on Marcel Proust -- and wrote increasingly about psychoanalysis and the theory of sexuality in the '80s and after. He was at UC-Berkeley for most of this time -- Foucault was also a visiting professor at Berkeley in the early '80s -- and thus near to the gay community in San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS crisis. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" was first published in an issue of the journal October dedicated to writing about AIDS.

Bersani's ideas are grounded in part by a reading of Freud, and Three Essays in particular, against the grain of the normalizing tendencies of psychoanalysis. As you read this essay, look out for the particular aspects of Freud's thought that Bersani emphasizes: what ideas from Freud does he find most useful in this essay (esp. pp. 22-4)? (Those of you who worked on Zizek in your essays may find this particularly resonant and interesting).

Bersani also engages extensively with the anti-pornography arguments of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whom we've seen mentioned earlier by Adrienne Rich. This is another useful, albeit somewhat condensed, example of exposition and critique: Bersani on the whole disagrees with MacKinnon and Dworkin, but he nonetheless discovers something valuable for his purposes in their argument. What does Bersani take from them? (See esp. 19-22)

We should, note, too, that Bersani argues avant la lettre (since Gender Trouble hadn't yet been published) against a view of gay men's relation to masculinity as fundamentally and subversively parodic. Bersani finds gay masculinity potentially subversive for other reason: what are they?

This, in turn, is related to the essay's broad claims about the relation between sex and politics, something we'll be thinking about increasingly in the coming weeks. How are these two realms related, on Bersani's reading?

Jeff Nunokawa, "'All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the Work of Mourning" (1991)

Jeff Nunokawa

This is an early essay by Nunokawa, a literary scholar who has since written  books on the Victorian novel and on Oscar Wilde (his The Tame Passions of Wilde is particularly brilliant). It's a useful essay for us in that its argument about James Merrill's poem continues the close reading work we've been doing with Plath and James, while it also engages with Bersani's essay (see notes 12 and 15 on page 322).

Nunokawa has two major projects in this essay. The first is to locate the figure of the "doomed homosexual," which acquired particular force during the AIDS crisis, in a tradition of representation that predates that crisis by at least a century. The second concerns "how to confront" this figure (320), a question that Nunokawa answers somewhat elliptically by connecting his reading of Merrill's elegy to an account of Bette Davis and Ronald Reagan in Dark Vision (1939). 

*How should we "confront" this figure--understand it, feel towards it--according to Nunokawa? 
*Does Merrill's elegy successfully do so? 

*And how does Nunokawa's argument about the relation of homosexuality and death, sexuality and politics, compare to Bersani's?

You can see Reagan's scene in Dark Vision below, at about 3:30 into the video: 

I will never ask for more than you can give,

Yet when you say, 'Be gay today and live,'

My heart answers cautiously, 

'Today will soon be gone.'

Why rush to meet our destiny,

Why rush to hurry on?

—Davis's song, at about 4:00 into the clip

Postscript

Here's my attempt to sketch out the path of Bersani's argument as far as we went with it on Wednesday--I'll refine this tomorrow if I have time, but I hope this rather sketchy version is helpful for now:

Everyone, whether repressed or not, has an “aversion” to sex (4). This aversion can be

“benign,” or

“malignant,” as it has been in the AIDS crisis.

Simon Watney understands this malignant aversion as a “displacement,” whereby “a spectacle of suffering and death has unleashed and even appeared to legitimize the impulse to murder” (4).

Why, then, have the deaths of gay men from AIDS intensified homophobia rather than leading to more urgent efforts to fight the disease?

In attempting to think this problem through, Bersani begins with two prior questions:

            How has it been possible for the media to ignore gay men’s suffering?

—The media has produced (not reflected) an image of the “family” that excludes homosexuals (9)

How is gay male sex related to gay male politics? Several ideas have been proposed by others:

*”Whitmanian democracy” (12)

—but, gay sexuality is often “ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive” (13)—which is no more than to say that everyone finds some people more desirable than others; sexual desire isn’t democratic.

*”subversive parod[y]” (12)

—but, gay macho styles are meant to be sexy, not parodic, nor do they pose any real threat to straight masculinity;

A problem with these ideas is that they see sexuality as reflecting politics. Bersani is interested in how sexual desire generates politics (14). And this is complicated for gay men (for sexual minorities) in a way that it isn’t for ethnic minorities, because on Bersani’s view gay men become gay through the “internalization of an oppressive mentality”—that is, through the internalization of a culturally constructed image of masculinity that excludes them. Gay men desire masculinity, but masculinity is what oppresses them. The enemy is within and beloved, as well as without. “The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies” (14).

What political use does such “loving identification” have? How might it help us to resist the “malignant aversion” to sex characteristic of AIDS-driven homophobia?

If gay desire involves identification with masculinity, it is also a desire for masculinity’s violation (15)—in the most basic and physical sense, for the male body to be penetrated as a female body can be.

Yet different people understand this desire to be violated in different ways—if to be masculine is to be unpenetrated, unviolated, then the desire to be penetrated represents a threat to identity, to the self—it violation can’t be understood as a source of pleasure, it will be perceived as a mortal threat. And so the desire to be violated appears as a desire for death, as “the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (18).

Bersani notices a surprising connection at this point: this fear of penetration (or /as violation) is shared by ancient Greek men and by certain contemporary feminists (MacKinnon and Dworkin): for both, “To be penetrated is to abdicate power” (19). MacKinnon and Dworkin see penetration/sex as indistinguishable from violence.

Bersani agrees, but he doesn’t see this as a bad thing—and if this sounds strange, it should. How could sex be a good thing if it’s indistinguishable from violence?

Let’s look at his objections to MacKinnon and Dworkin. He agrees with them that sex is violent. However: “What bothers me about MacKinnon and Dworkin is not their analysis of sexuality, but rather the pastoralizing, redemptive intentions that support the analysis” (22). In other words, for Bersani, the problem with MacKinnon and Dworkin’s view is that they wish to separate sex from violence. Ironically, this wish propagates the phallocentrism that they wish to combat: “Phallocentrism is…the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women…of a…radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (24).

This is roughly where we left off in class, and the question for these last pages of Bersani’s argument is this: how is sexual powerlessness politically valuable?

As you think this through, it may help to see the following concepts as distinct:

* violence perpretrated by the self, as opposed to violence perpertrated against the self

* sexual violence as opposed to political violence; we may need better terms here, for the sort of sexual violence that Bersani is interested in isn’t, for example, rape, but rather the violence involved in even the most consensual sex