Pictures of a virus: Ideological choices and the representation of HIV

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 9, Issue 27, 1998, Pages 337-349

  Rosello, Mireille ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644575309     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/095715589800902706     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Woman interviewed during the TV programme entitled: 'Savoir Plus, Santé: Sida, Ceux qui résistent;' 1 April 1995. FR2, 13:39.
2. S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
3. For an analysis of the similar merging between science-fiction and cutting-edge imaging techniques, see Lisa Cartwright's account of the discovery of X-Rays and of their 'both gothic and modernist' applications. L. Cartwright, 'Decomposing the body: X rays and the cinema', in Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota Press, 1995), 107-42, 107.
4. P. Treichler, 'Aids, homophobia, and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification', in D. Crimp (ed.), Aids, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 31-70.
5. P. Marchand and J. Marzion, Le Sida: Connaître, Comprendre, Agir (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
6. 'Sidamag', 21 November 1995, FR3, 22:19.
7. See J. Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991). He denounces the 'rituals of decontamination' resulting from the moral panic that, according to him, lasted between 1982 and 1985: 'Lesbians and gay men were refused service in restaurants, theatre personnel refused to work with gay actors, the trash cans of people suspected of having AIDS were not emptied, children with the virus were banned from schools and the dead were left unburied' (:119).
8. (Guibert, A l'ami, 14-15).
9. 'C'est pas sorcier: le magazine de la découverte et de la science: Sida', January 1996, produced by Oliver Chevillard, FR3
10. The metaphor is particularly banal but, perhaps more importantly, it proposes a literal construction of the most commonplace of military images to be found in literature on AIDS. See Christopher Robinson's Scandal in the Ink (London: Cassell, 1995).
11. In the chapter devoted to 'Aids writing in France and the gay self-image' (:117-43), the author identifies and criticizes the same 'phallocratic military vocabulary' in Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe's Corps à corps: journal du sida
12. and in Jean-Noël'Pancrazi's Les Quartiers d'hiver.
13. Cartoons have played an important role in the discourse of prevention and information. In their study of French, Belgian and American cartoons addressed to young readers by professional cartoonists or by institutions, Philippe Videlier and Pierine Piras's note that cartoonists (like the authors of animated sequences) face potentially serious ideological choices: 'La bande dessinée de communication, en effet, trouve rarement un équilibre satisfaisant entre l'efficacité du propos et celle de l'esthétique (tant linguistique qu'iconique). La nécessaire simplicité du message, voir le souci de coller au public, conduit souvent à des développements assez discutables' (:123). See P. Videlier and P. Piras, 'L'image des maux,' L'Homme contaminé: la tourmente du sida, C. Thiaudière with B. Ajchenbaum-Boffety (éds) (Paris: Autrement, 1992), 120-30.
14. See L. Montagnier, Le Sida et la société française: rapport au premier ministre (Paris: La Documentation française, 1994), 225. In rich countries in the West (and especially those in the Northern Hemisphere), medical research is viewed as one of the most efficient components of the fight against the disease. The assumption seems to be that what is discovered in the North will somehow trickle down and benefit poor countries eventually. In the meantime, research in African states is seen as an impossible luxury, local prevention and information becoming top priorities. It might be necessary to evaluate the unequal distribution of authority invested in low-tech, grass-root interventions and highly specialized and mechanized western medical research. The same tensions occur within Western countries where researchers are not expected to be sheltered by the ivory tower of pure science. For an analysis of the friction generated when researchers, associations and the media confronted their priorities during the 1989 Congress in Paris (researchers insisting on their need for serenity and the public demanding that knowledge circulate)
15. see Bernard Debré's Le Voleur de vie (Paris: Fallois, 1989), 139-47.
16. C. Coe, Such Times (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1994).
17. Similarly, Jean-Paul Aron talks about 'mon sida' and not 'le sida' See J.-P. Aron, Mon Sida (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988).
18. Thank you to Jean-Pierre Boulé and Wendy Michallat for their generous reading of the first draft.