Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS
1 In her groundbreaking 1978 essay "Illness as Metaphor," Susan Sontag argues that the language of disease is particularly damning for patients. She writes, "Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious [. . .]. Contact with someone afflicted with a disease regarded as a mysterious malevolency inevitably feels like a trespass; worse, like the violation of a taboo" (6). Diagnosis, all too often in medical history, has been the proxy of blame. While illness, stigma, and social exclusion are not new to HIV/AIDS, the social stigmas associated with HIV transmission have created a new iteration of blame and reward that is particularly gendered.
2 Inherent in the treatment of women within the history of HIV/AIDS is a history as old as Lilith and Eve. I would like to posit two cultural conceptions of "woman" which inform the reaction to women in the AIDS community: the "virgin/whore" split, the cultural constructions of La Virgen de Guadelupe and La Malinche.[1]The archetype of the virgin/whore split is abundant in literature. One particularly useful discussion and explanation of it is in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera. See especially pages 16-18 and 28-34 (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). Or, to put it another way: the good girl/bad girl dichotomy. This dichotomy is a convenient social construction that reinforces women's social positions. Women who tend to those who fall ill are romanticized as philanthropic and noble; women who fall ill are social pariahs deserving of their illness because they have transgressed social boundaries. Despite their intentions and their subject matter, even twenty-five years into the pandemic, both of these constructions are important to the women poets of AIDS.
3 In the first decade of HIV/AIDS, women were virtually invisible except in care-taking roles. Playing into some of the oldest stereotypes for women, these care-takers represent the "good girls" who seek to help the unfortunate. They were present, but voiceless, in a pandemic in which they participated. Women positive for HIV were almost never mentioned. Katie Hogan and Nancy L. Roth comment in the introduction to their 1998 anthology, Gendered Epidemic, "An explosion of what theorist Cindy Patton calls a 'new visibility of 'woman' in discussions of HIV infection has occurred in the last five years" (xiv). "[T]his new visibility of 'woman,'" however, Hogan and Roth continue, "no matter how crucial, hard won, and necessary cannot explain the deeply entrenched historical silences and gendered distortions that characterized the first decade of the HIV pandemic, and that often continue to structure HIV/AIDS prevention efforts targeted toward women and representations of women and HIV/AIDS" (xiv).
4 According to Cindy Patton, the many white, straight, middle-class women serving as caregivers represent the Reagan/Bush years, during which charities began to fulfill services previously that were the purview of the government (Inventing AIDS). At the same time gay men were blamed for their illness at the beginning of the pandemic, women who sought to help them were culturally rewarded for their philanthropy.[2]In Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), Patton outlines the need for activism versus charity. She writes, "AIDS activists — many of whom had themselves received an AIDS/ARC diagnosis — worked with gay and heterosexual PLWAs in the context of community organizing rather than altruism, and understood their work in terms of political resistance rather than compassion" (21). They are blameless and honored for their work with the "unfortunates" of society. Yet their philanthropy often contributed to an extension of stereotypes and cultural roles rather than interrupted the dominant social paradigms to work for social change. As Cindy Patton explains, the arrival of this group of women represented a move within the AIDS community from activism to charity. The "good girls" of charity are culturally positioned in opposition to the "bad girls" living with HIV.
5 Culture's insistence on prescribed gender roles, however, has perpetuated the stigma of AIDS even more significantly for positive women than for women caregivers. Poet River Huston and photographer Mary Berridge transcribed oral histories of women positive for HIV in A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living with HIV and took photographs of the women's family lives. Their stories emphasize the AIDS generation's virgin/whore split. Culturally, to test positive for HIV means that a woman has either defied cultural conventions by sleeping with too many men or is an "innocent" victim on whom such a horrible atrocity has been inflicted. Karri Stokely, who tested positive in 1996, explains: "People decide if you're worthy of empathy depending on how you were infected. It's really judgmental. Like you deserve it if you slept with 50 men, but you're an innocent if it was only one. People have turned it into a moral issue" (Positive 44). Society judges a woman positive for HIV on several levels: first, did she "deserve" to "get" it? And secondly, if the woman positive for HIV is a mother, there is a second, more compelling judgment: did she willingly abandon her child through her reckless behavior? While questions of blame are not specific to women (early HIV/AIDS literature is full of examples of social ostracism and blame for those living in the gay community), the inclusion of women's voices chronicling their HIV/AIDS experiences has added to our understanding of the stigma of HIV/AIDS.