Viral Bodies: AIDS and Other Contagions in Latin American Life Narratives
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Date
2023-07-06
Authors
Jaramillo, Jon
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The HIV/AIDS crisis in Latin America was overshadowed by the late phase of the Cold War, while authoritarian governments promoted discourses reflecting moral and ethical exceptionalism. People with AIDS (PWAs) experienced multiple crises—moral excision by the state, marginalization, and the certainty of death. Existing societal infrastructures of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality urged their marginalized lives into even more precarious ways of being. The authoritarian and hegemonic discourses complicated and intensified how PWAs experienced isolation, internal exile, neglect, condemnation, discrimination, and death. These exceptional conditions led to a 10-year delay before works by Latin American artists and writers emerged. My dissertation examines works by Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), Pedro Lemebel (Chile), and Pablo Perez (Argentina) since they reveal a spectrum of intersectional AIDS subjectivities exhibiting accommodation, resistance, and transgression of prevailing national and religious norms. Drawing from the fields of exile studies, transfeminism, contagion theory, and virality, my dissertation argues that these narratives break imposed silences by radically exteriorizing the insularity, anonymity, and decomposing bodies of those dying, and living, with the disease. They intervene in national, transnational, and religious discourses. They also challenge the limits of gender and genre, while contributing to a (re)imagining of homosexual history. They offer utopian visions of kinship, belonging, and community formation and bring practices of difference such as transvestism, sadomasochism, and spiritual fetishism into focus.
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Keywords
contagious metaphor, exile studies, HIV/AIDS, life narratives, transfeminism, virality