Plague of Pariahs: AIDS 'Zines and the Rhetoric of Transgression

Abstract

Mainstream AIDS activists in the 1980s responded to demonizing and stigmatizing representations of the HIV infected by attempting to “normalize” people living with AIDS. However, some gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s, catalyzed by antigay politics since the late 1970s and overwhelmed by the excessively apocalyptic and overdetermined representations of AIDS in popular media, deliberately embraced the role of sexual and medical pariah, celebrated social anxieties about their public danger as vectors of infection, and repudiated the sympathetically sentimentalizing images of “AIDS victims.” Adopting the rhetoric of punk culture and its forms of self-representation—particularly the punk rock-derived “fanzine” or “'zine”—these “infected faggots” and “diseased pariahs” exposed and celebrated their HIV status and erotic adventurism. However, the writers, editors, and publishers of AIDS 'zines contended with the competing claims of performative self-representation, on one hand, and of a readership, on the other. The result in such 'zines as Infected Faggot Perspectives and Diseased Pariah News was a continuous crisis of self-representation evident even in the format and technology of the 'zines print publication and circulation.

The shifting politics of patient activism: From bio-sociality to bio-digital citizenship

“…Traditional media were a key component of the earliest HIV/AIDS activism (Altman, 1994;Diedrich, 2016;Gillett, 2003aGillett, , 2003b with different manifestations, including video, artworks (e.g. the Gran Fury collective), zines (Long, 2000) and the AIDS memorial quilt (Gambardella, 2011). More traditional (i.e.…”

Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines

“…In doing so, it stands in contrast to the aesthetics of most zines and certainly in contrast to the hard-scrabble, cut-andpaste, typewritten aesthetics of IFP. In an excellent article about DPN and IFP, Long (2000) argues that IFP's cut-and-paste aesthetic and DPN's ''technophilia'' index different political orientations and constitute different relations with audiences. In its presentation of collages of images created by others, for example, IFP offers a ''repudiation of capitalist notions of the ownership of 'intellectual property','' while DPN editors find themselves having to defend their do-it-yourself, ''underground'' credentials in the face of their excellent production values (p. 405).…”

“…Although neither of the zines are produced any longer, they still circulate through activist lore, appearances in mainstream media, patrons' use of them at LGBTQ archives, through Long's (2000) article and this manuscript, and in myriad, untraceable ways. Their continuing circulation, according to Warner (2002), suggests that they continue to constitute a public.…”