On Not Living With AIDS: Or, AIDS-As-Post-Crisis

Abstract

Advances in antiretroviral treatments mean that people are living longer with HIV and that the spectacular and politicitzed deaths characteristic of earlier moments of the AIDS crisis are less prominent. New cultural understandings of AIDS-as-post-crisis see AIDS as a “manageable” illness. A contradiction has emerged between HIV prevention work based on an explicit Othering of the HIV+ body and advocacy programs on behalf of Persons Living with AIDS (PLWA). The space of the HIV+ body, therefore, simultaneously is and is not ‘just like everyone else.’ This paper offers a reading of “Negative Role Model,” a recent HIV prevention campaign aimed at Gay men launched by the New Zealand AIDS Foundation (NZAF) that was an attempt to overcome this contradiction. “Negative Role Model,” unlike earlier campaigns that rested upon an image of the PLWA as diseased, sinister and always already dead, sought to provide a positive example of the benefits of remaining HIV-. This attempt to avoid the contradictory representations of the PLWA by shifting the representational burden of prevention work away from the PLWA ultimately fails. Drawing on the work of Douglas Crimp (2002) and William Haver (1996) it is argued that the body of the PLWA is paradoxical site that is not reconcilable with the gay identity politics that emerged in relation to the politicization of AIDS deaths.