Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 6:
26 Howe and Newman, by virtue of living in the seronegative world, serve as translators of their experience. In writing about Johnny and Buddy, they seek to pull down the barriers between the "positive" and the "negative" worlds, by examining the received social and cultural notions of sexuality and identity. Howe's languid sensuality insists that readers connect their own sexuality to a world of HIV/AIDS. Howe, not her HIV+ brother, becomes the sexual center of this book, inverting the expectations of the reader. Similarly, Newman uses her own identity as part of the lesbian and gay community to mediate between the "positive" and "negative" worlds.
27 While Newman and Howe seek to undermine the virgin/whore split implicit in HIV/AIDS as they seek to enter into the HIV/AIDS community with socially transgressive verse that confronts the heteronormative and patriarchal constructions of women, Tory Dent and River Huston, as positive women writing about their own HIV, create a powerful poetic witness against stereotypes as they seek to confront and rewrite cultural norms.
28 Tory Dent is the author of three book-length collections which address HIV/AIDS, What Silence Equals (1993), HIV, Mon Amour (1999) and Black Milk (2005). The recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Whiting Foundation, and the PEN organization, Tory Dent writes about the complexities of living with HIV in a post-protease world. Rather than accepting the cultural rhetoric of "miracle drugs," Dent's work has consistently questioned those drugs and their effects on women. Dent's poetry also confronts the social constructions of women, as she boldly challenges assumptions and neat categorizations for women who are positive for HIV.
29 In "The Deferred Dream," an essay about the complexities of wanting children and being HIV+, Dent echoes many of the sentiments the women in A Positive Life maintain about gender and HIV. She writes:
Stricken by a disease that affected so many gay men, as well as living in NYC where the disease was politicized and protested in the context of gay rights, the underlying prejudice against homosexuality exhibited in the passivity of the Reagan/Bush administration, I came to forget I was a woman in a way. I felt both caught up in the tidal urgency of HIV/AIDS activism and yet utterly isolated in my position as a heterosexual female, wanting to delineate my own path of reaction and response that was not only just true to myself but respected the integrity, the solidarity of the persecuted class. I was not a gay man. As a woman I had experienced the expectations of a patriarchal society. I knew I was subjugated, robbed of rights and privileges, but my fight was a different fight from that of homosexuals. (125)
Women, Dent posits, are in a very different subject position than men, particularly gay men, positive for HIV. They are at the margins of an already marginalizing disease. Dent, like many other HIV+ women was neither a part of the early HIV/AIDS community nor wholly separate from it. Yet gender is dismissed, forgotten, ignored as an important part of the construction of HIV/AIDS in the United States. Dent continues, offering her observations on the issue of women and culpability:
The closest I could come to understanding would be to witness the hardened faces and accusatory looks, the implicit repulsion when I revealed that I was HIV-positive. More often than not, I encountered this tenor of recrimination in the medical community, from nurses and technicians and even doctors. Then people would ask me how I was exposed (I wondered how often they would ask a gay man that). I would answer that I had a boyfriend who was a hemophiliac who died of AIDS in 1984 […]. "I don't see why it matters," I would add. After a while, I would decline to answer when they asked how I was exposed. I know I was opting for the rougher attitude by not complying with their need to know if I was one of the "true" victims, but it didn't much matter since life had become so much rougher anyway. (125)
Dent's books speak to her unusual courage, to her facility in creating a form to address HIV in society and her life, to her recognition of the need to speak out about the position of a woman living with HIV. As the passage above indicates, women living with HIV confront a different set of prejudices and stereotypes, all of which reflect social constructions of womanhood; a "woman" has a certain place in society, with prescribed social and sexual roles to fulfill. What Dent gives to her reader, in a dialogue that begins in What Silence Equals and extends to Black Milk is a poetry speaking out of the tradition confronting silences surrounding socially constructed sexual roles.
30 The title poem of Dent's first collection, "What Silence Equals," pits "wild grass" against the power of farming to conform the land. "Homogeneous, wild, quiet/Homogeny in a pretense of superiority," Dent writes (19). The land, and in particular "the wild grass," as a metaphor for the body of a woman, must all be the same, homogeneous; homogeneity, as the "superior" and commodity-driven concept defines the thrust of the poem. The machinery of farming, masculinized as "Plow, conform, unharrowed/Like strong men at the circus with handlebar mustaches" make such a commodification possible (19). The patriarchal construction of the plow develops the relationship between the masculine machinery and the feminine earth: "The plow will conform into manageability the unharrowed" (19). While the relationship between women's bodies and farming/planting/fertility is not unusual, it is Dent's subject position as a woman living with HIV that makes this connection all the more sinister. The "wild grass" must conform to social constructions of woman and the roles she plays in society.