Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 8:
36 While all bodies affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic — and other diseases — become objects, the relationship between a woman's body and society is different; the history of art, religion, marketing, and fashion, among other things, centralize the role of the woman's body in society; women's bodies are looked at and constructed as central images in society. For the woman living with HIV, with a body ravaged by the effects of the virus, the gendered, and specifically female body as object takes on a much more central importance. Inherent in the HIV+ female body are all the transgressions of the woman, all the ways in which the woman, this woman, does not live up to her prescribed social role.
37 Dent emphasizes this through her continual negotiation of the body. She describes the motion of her body, moving "until I receded in sync with the daylight/from chair back to bed as if falling backwards in slow motion, the way/a display dummy does during a rehearsed car crash" (4) The body is like a "display dummy," an inanimate object on which tests are conducted to ensure safety for other bodies. The metaphoric implications of this connection are obvious; Dent's body provides safety for other, future bodies. Living in quarantine secures that safety.
38 Also at the heart of Dent's work, an issue connected to the body, are questions of sensuality and intimacy. The constructions of desire and sexual gratification, often theorized in gay men's writing, are central to Dent's work. She writes,
But the pleasure of touch I never refused when he
climbed gently into the narrow cot with me, winter jacket still on, the sudden
cold of his earlobes against my cheek, the thick cardboard material of the
quarantine mask which we would defiantly indent in order to kiss. (9)
Dent's voice, speaking for a sexuality within HIV/AIDS is an important — and controversial — view. Again, the implications of sexuality for a woman living with HIV, culturally, are different than for a gay man living with HIV. However, I would argue that in practice, the implications are the same. Dent, ostensibly, is to blame here by embracing her sexuality living with HIV and in quarantine. The Puritanical constructions of female sexuality almost demand that Dent repress her sexuality because of HIV; in essence, this is a prescription for life before the women's rights movement in the same way HIV/AIDS-era sexuality for gay men has been constructed culturally as pre-Stonewall. This element of Dent's work is crucial and something created out of the silences surrounding women and HIV/AIDS.
39 Black Milk picks up where HIV, Mon Amour leaves off and is one of the most interesting recent collections of post-protease AIDS poetry. Black Milk, as the virus continues its path through society, and as the government becomes increasingly regressive about HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, begins to take on a militancy that post-protease AIDS poetry, from 1995 to the early 2000s had lost. Dent continues to be consumed by the disease. As HIV continues to progress in her own body, Black Milk presents a collection of poems that are angry, defiant, and accusatory. Here, Dent unapologetically writes her own epitaph, one which challenges any of the easy cliches society has come to use around HIV/AIDS.
40 Dent says, "My death began on April 12, 1988,/over a pay phone at an artist's colony in upstate New York,/in a windowless, wainscotted phone closet, where a single bare bulb/suspended above me, the enucleated eye of some god surveying its work" (6) In this poem, Dent continues the work of HIV, Mon Amour, as she writes her rotting body onto the page. She is merciless in her transcription of physical deterioration. She writes, "Each level of the disease, the gradations of physical recession,/the lungs, the gut, the eyes, the brain — systems of torture,/instigated by an interrogator I cannot target beyond the decoy glare" (7). This physical demise is the counter to the angels. Death, as Dent writes it, isn't a beautiful, miraculous passing.