Performing POZ: Irish Theatre, HIV Stigma, and ‘Post-AIDS’ Identities

Abstract

This essay interrogates how the theatre of Queer monologist Neil Watkins challenges HIV-stigma, while simultaneously reconciling his Queerness and HIV-positivity with a sense of Irishness. The development of life-saving drugs for the treatment of HIV means that, in certain parts of the world, including Ireland, people are no longer dying from AIDS, but living with HIV. This has given rise to what cultural commentators call a ‘Post-AIDS’ discourse, whereby a discourse of crisis and death has evolved into one of health and typical life expectancy. In terms of being ‘post-AIDS’, Ireland bifurcates into two paradoxical socio-cultural discourses: that of HIV as a medical event, and that of AIDS as a cultural narrative. And while the discourse surrounding HIV the medical event is progressive and democratic, the cultural narrative of AIDS in Ireland is steeped in stigma, ignorance, and contagion paranoia. This damaging narrative is mirrored and embodied in Irish theatre. Interrogating Irish theatre's contentious relationship with the HIV-positive body reveals persistent themes of absence, hiddenness, illness, and death. Neil Watkins disrupts this dramaturgy of shame by mobilizing HIV-stigma to political effect, disrupting received knowledge and cultural assumptions about the HIV-positive body and its current theatrical placement within an anachronistic discourse of crisis. In earlier monologues such as A Cure for Homosexuality (2005) Watkins blurs the lines between the fictional HIV-positive character and the living performer, engendering a troubling tension for the spectator. With his latest work, The Year of Magical Wanking (2010) Watkins further evolves this space whereby the boundaries between character and performer are completely negated. By journeying through Watkins's ‘magical’ year of quotidian HIV-stigma and sexual shame, the spectator discovers the roots of such shame and stigma are not only embedded in Irish socio-political structures, but also in a limiting and narrow heteronormative sexual imaginary.