"留意這腐爛帶蛆性行為": 論艾德蒙．懷特深刻書寫的性愛、疾病、死亡議題 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文. 指導教授：陳音頤教授 Advisor：Professor Yin-I Chen. 治政 "留意這腐爛帶蛆性行為” : 論艾德蒙．懷特<已婚男人> 大立 ‧. ‧ 國. 學. 深刻書寫的性愛、疾病、死亡議題. “Alert to even the grubbiest sexual possibility”: The Immersive Writing of Sex,. y. Nat. n. al. er. io. sit. Disease, Death in Edmund White’s The Married Man. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 研究生：胡家銘 Name：Chia-Ming Hu 中華民國一百零一年十二月 December, 2012.

(2) “Alert to even the grubbiest sexual possibility”: The Immersive Writing of Sex, Disease, Death in Edmund White’s The Married Man. A Master Thesis Presented to Department of English,. 立. 政治大. National Chengchi University. ‧. ‧ 國. 學 er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. n. iv. In Fulfillment n CPartial h i U e n g for c hthe of the Requirements Degree of Master of Arts. by Name：Daniel Chia-Ming Hu Date : December, 2012.

(3) To Eva I-Yin Chen 獻給我的恩師陳音頤教授. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. iii. i n U. v.

(4) Acknowledgement. My warmest thanks go to Dr. Eva I-Yin Chen, Distinguished Professor of department of English of National Chengchi University, for her inspiring guidance and encouragement throughout my research for this work. For their reading of the manuscript and for helpful suggestions and other support, I want to thank Dr. Su-lin Yu, Dr. Tsui-feng Jiang. My gratitude is also extended to Dr. Yen-bin Chiou and Dr. Te-hsuan for their instruction during. 政治大 Finally, I would like to extend my heart-felt thanks to my family. My parents’ support 立. my study at National Chengchi University.. and blessing and, especially, my partner’s help and understandings have made this work. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. io. sit. y. Nat. n. al. er. possible.. Ch. engchi. iv. i n U. v.

(5) Table of Contents. Acknowledgements……………………..…………………………………………….iii Chinese Abstract ..........................................................................................................vi English Abstract...........................................................................................................vii Chapter 1. Introduction.............................................................................................1 2. Dialectics of Gay Sex in Edmund White’s AIDS Writing………………….21. 政治大. Social Making of AIDS…………………………….………. … …………..23. 立. Biomedical Gaze and Voyeurism of AIDS Body…………………………..28. ‧ 國. 學. Dialectics of Promiscuity and Safer Sex……………………........................34 3. Shock as a Weapon: The Grotesque Body and White’s Immersive writing in. ‧. The Married Man...........................................................................................49. y. Nat. sit. Joseph Cady’s AIDS Immersive and Counter-Immersive Writing ……...…54. n. al. er. io. The Grotesque Body and Death in White’s AIDS Writing …………..…….61. i n U. v. 4. Finding Hope in AIDS Writing: Closet Body and Queer Kinship …………71. Ch. engchi. The Dynamic of Hope/Despair Embodied in the HIV Closet Body …….....71 Queer Kinship Constructed by HIV Virus…………………………….........87 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………95 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………101. v.

(6) 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文提要. 論文名稱："留意這腐爛帶蛆性行為” : 論艾德蒙．懷特<已婚男人>. 政治大. 深刻書寫的性愛、疾病、死亡議題. 立. 指導教授：陳音頤教授. ‧ 國. ‧. Nat. y. 論文提要內容：. 學. 研究生：胡家銘. sit. n. al. er. io. 本論文藉由艾德蒙．懷特愛滋小說《已婚男人》裡、對男同志性愛/死亡在愛滋年代的辨證關係，探討愛滋文學所能扮演的文化功能。第二章、利用傅柯式圓形監獄概念衍生下主體自我內化規訓，討論男同志性愛原先具有的顛覆本質，如何隨著 80 年代、 HIV 病毒出現，在生物醫學論述下對男同志進行”再次病理化”的辨證關係。第三章參考喬瑟夫．凱迪在 1993 年發表的文章、分類愛滋書寫為深刻書寫和反深刻書寫，討論<已婚男人>裡愛滋深刻書寫裡、藉由呈現詭異疾病身體來製造驚嚇感、引發讀者對於愛滋議題另一層次的反思。第四章、則是探討<已婚男人>呈現無病徵的衣櫃身體、其造成主體／客體在視覺上/心理上、介於有病/無病的模糊詭譎狀態，可以被視為愛滋文學、一種提供讀者在愛滋年代裡、在絕望中仍可懷抱希望的正面力量。透過以上探討、艾德蒙．懷特＜已婚男人＞豎立愛滋書寫之中、呈現男同志文化與愛滋病複雜關係的傑出作品。. Ch. engchi. vi. i n U. v.

(7) Abstract This study discusses Edmund White’s AIDS writing in his The Married Man, a fiction that depicts the issue of gay sex and death in the age of the Epidemic. In chapter two, I intend to discuss about how biomedical discourse of HIV/AIDS fosters a Focauldian apparatus of. 政治大. panoptical surveillance and self-discipline in relation to gay sex. With the advent of HIV. 立. virus, the once subversive lifestyle of gay sex becomes more problematic. In chapter three, I. ‧ 國. 學. attempt to employ Joseph Cady’s definition of AIDS writings as either immersive or. ‧. counter-immersive, and argue that Edmund White’s The Married Man should be viewed as. Nat. io. sit. y. an immersive AIDS writing wherein the ugliness of the grotesque body is used as a literary. er. weapon to engender its readers a sense of shock. In chapter four, I contend Austin’s HIV. al. n. v i n C h Man should beUviewed as an ambiguous symbol asymptomatic/closet body in The Married engchi wherein a Hegelian dialectics between hope (future) and despair (no future) is discussed. To conclude, Edmund White’s The Married Man, a subversive text as it is, stands as a masterpiece of AIDS writing not only giving a vivid portrayal of the history of HIV/AIDS but promising its gay readers a potentiality of hope and future to go forward.. vii.

(8) CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION. The main issue for today‘s gay writers is perhaps not whether they can write about homosexuality or about their experience and feelings of gay men, but how gay. 政治大. fiction actually reflects upon the macro-politics related to the gay issue in the age of. 立. Post-Stonewall.1 Edmund White is such a gay writer whose literary works. ‧ 國. 學. demonstrate how the enactment of the macro-politics has a great impact on the. ‧. micro experience of gay men in their daily life. It is not until the 1980s that Edmund. y. Nat. al. er. io. sit. White published his first two gay novels—A Boy’s Own Story (1984) and The. n. Beautiful Room Is Empty2 (1988) —expressing how the homosexual characters are. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. forced to confront people‘s antagonism after identifying themselves as gay in a homophobic context. Given the presence of biomedical narratives3 of AIDS alongside the issue‘s attendant representation by the media in the 1980s, Edmund. 1. Stonewall Riots refers to the first event of gay protest against the police violence in 1969, New York City. This event is later marked as the start of the gay rights movement in America and around the world. See Barry Adam‘s ―The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Movement‖ for further information of the history about the Stonewall Riots (3-10). 2 Together with The Farewell Symphony, these three novels are recognized as the trilogy of the life of one homosexual character through his coming-of-age to his later adulthood. 3 This term generally refers to knowledge derived from the fields of human medicine and other bio-technology. Cf. Donna Haraway (203-30), Michel Foucault (56-72), and Catherine Waldby etc. in discussing how the bio-discourse of HIV/AIDS has been particularly linked with the homosexual body. 1.

(9) White has reflected his concern over how the emergence of the HIV virus has posed a threat to the unity of gay community in his two later novels—The Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man (2000).4 While the former spans the gay hedonist era of the 1970s as well as the AIDS panic in the early 1990s, the latter depicts exclusively how the shadow of the AIDS/HIV crisis has altered the life of gay men in the late 1980s. Yet, one critic maintains Edmund White‘s The Married Man is not so much a novel relates to gay desire/sexuality as that whose issue of the same-sexed friendship. 治政大critic of gay is more privileged (Purvis 294). Gregory Woods—a famous 立 ‧ 國. 學. literature—holds that as the language of HIV/AIDS has been sexualized by either bio-scientific discourse or media representation, ―AIDS and homosexual are. ‧. sit. y. Nat. considered to be synonymous,‖ an issue that has become crucial for each gay writer to. n. al. er. io. either reflect on or confront in their works (372). Clearly, Edmund White‘s The. i n U. v. Married Man is such a significant novel dealing with the topic of HIV/AIDS, which. Ch. engchi. seeks to problematize the legitimacy of the biomedical discourse in relation to gay identity by exposing the ambiguous attributes of the HIV virus. The body, as Pamela Gilbert argues, constitutes a metaphor where the discursive difference between self and other is written and read (2). Gilbert further discursively extends this metaphor of the body in relation to the organization of the 4. White has also publishes three other short stores related to AIDS/HIV— An Oracle, Palace Days, and Running on Empty, all of which are collected in The Darker Proof (1988).. 2.

(10) whole society. As she puts it, the body as a metaphor is ―extended throughout human experience of difference-within-unity,‖ a signifier which can not be viewed independently from the perspective of macro-politics (44). In the same vein as Gilbert‘s assumption that the body should be grasped as a socially constructed, irreducible physical space of the self corresponding to the outer discursive society, Peter Brooks argues in his ―Narrative and the Body‖ that the body should be recognized as a nexus upon which gender identity and its attendant sexual desire are. 治政 incorporated, a site which is permeable of linguistic大 signifiers from within the social 立 ‧ 國. 學. regime—―the sign imprints the body, making it part of the signifying process‖ (3). The body should be thereby recognized as a nexus of linguistic/political narrative. ‧. sit. y. Nat. implicated in the embodiment of the scenario/structure of gender politics, a narrative. n. al. er. io. that associates man and woman with public and private, respectively. Given that the. i n U. v. linguistic signifiers imprinted unto the body of the homosexual tend to be privatized. Ch. engchi. and debased by the modern regime of instrumental reason, such a body, as Lee Edelman suggests, ―becomes subject to a metonymic dispersal that allows it to be read into almost everything‖ (7). Edelman sees this inscription unto the body of the homosexual as homographesis, an inscription as ―cultural mechanism by which writing is brought into ….conceiv[ing] the gay body as text, thereby effecting a far-reaching intervention in the political regulation of social identities‖ (10; emphasis 3.

(11) mine). Not only does the body of the homosexual in literary works thereby manifests, as Brooks suggests, the object of linguistic signifiers, but it is also an object inscribed often in deviant ways against the dominant discourse, in that such a body—as represented in the biomedical discourse since the mid-nineteenth century—has been pathologized, against which the normality of the heterosexual identity can be justified (128). Most historians of sexology suggest the homosexuals—an identity that is popularly conceived as sexually excessive and promiscuous—have been regarded as. 治政大for the social death the carriers of sexual diseases, a scapegoat who is responsible 立 ‧ 國. 學. (Dollimore 135; Weeks 301).. With the rise of AIDS/HIV narrative since the early 1980s, the homosexual. ‧. sit. y. Nat. body has been further recognized as a diseased other, by which the organic whole of. n. al. er. io. healthy (heterosexual) self is threatened (Crawford 1348). In the legitimate language. i n U. v. of the bio-scientific, says Donna Haraway, the enhancement of one‘s immune system. Ch. engchi. is constructed as the key for health, whereas the HIV virus—a retrovirus that is said to kill the cells of the immune system—is conceived as a tremendous threat to the healthy self (221-23). Following Foucault‘s genealogy, Catherine Waldby aspires to challenge the legitimacy of biomedicine in relation to HIV by virtue of denaturalizing the perception of retrovirus as that which breeds exclusively within the body of the homosexual, thereby revealing the intervention of the power relation in such an issue 4.

(12) Biomedicine is a useful discourse of governance precisely because of its capacity to translate social relations into ‗neutral‘ technical discourse, and a set of practices and techniques which limit the effects of contagion and epidemic. This capacity enables it to intervene in detailed ways in a social field, to practice a micropolitics of the body and a macropolitics of the body politic, subsuming both domains of intervention under the flexible rhetoric of health. (141). 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. Even though Waldby has provided a means for challenging the legitimacy of the biomedicine discourse concerning AIDS/HIV, what has often proved more powerful is. ‧. sit. y. Nat. the mourning portrayal of AIDS patients in the literary writings.. n. al. er. io. Thus, the HIV virus is always already sexually transcoded into a scientific. i n U. v. linguistic metaphor complicit with the mechanism of misogynism and that of 5. Ch. engchi. homophobia. As such, the body of the homosexual has been fantasized as a compromised and diseased other, transgressing the prescribed border of normality. Insofar as the representation of AIDS in media6 tends to echo this bio-scientific myth. 5. Steven Kruger draws upon a bio metaphor in relation to gender narrative to account for how the retrovirus of HIV has been coded as the alternative, perverse masculinity as opposed to the proper masculine expression of DNA, a metaphoric virus linked gendered-ideologically with the homosexual,--―the [HIV] retrovirus represents a perverse threat to the coherence of linguistic process imagined at the cellular level‖ (38 emphasis mine). 6 See Simon Watney‘s Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, in which Watney relates AIDS to ―a crisis of representation‖ whereby this disease and its carriers become stigmatized and demonized by the media itself (9). Also, Paula Treichler in ―AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical 5.

(13) so as to fortify the symbolic boundary between the healthy (heterosexual) self and diseased (homosexual) other—now a HIV other—, this Hegelian master/slave dialectic serves to justify the subjugation of one cultural body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and agency. Marco Pustianaz writes that gay writing is characterized by the ―biographical homosexual of the author, [the text‘s] hidden homosexual codings, its latent meaning, its textual reception, all of these or a variable combination‖ (146). In addition, Tony. 治政大therapeutic guide for Purvis recognizes the therapeutic power of gay fictions as the 立 ‧ 國. 學. the gay subjects, as they enable ―community-building and militancy in periods of homophobic hostility‖ (298) challenges the oppression of heteronormative discourse.. ‧. sit. y. Nat. Prior to the 1969 Stonewall Riot, and the emergence of the gay right movement, the. n. al. er. io. very issues with which gay writers deal the most rest on how the gay male characters. i n U. v. struggle over his sexual identity. As such, the inside/outside of the closet serves as the. Ch. engchi. most significant metaphor for the early gay fictions (Purvis 304). Edmund White suggests his first two gay fictions—A Boy’s Own Story and A Beautiful Is Empty—are gay consciousness-raising books, for they reveal how the adolescent protagonists Discourse contends that along with the homophobic representation of biomedical discourse, this disease has been transformed into ―being a particular kind of person rather than doing particular thing‖ (44). Regarding AIDS as now ―an epidemic of signification‖ in Western culture, Treichler further holds that certain sexual identity is irrationally, ideologically positioned by ―the main discourse‖ as the scapegoat for blame. See also Cindy Patton suggests how people links AIDS with queer identity, as she puts it, ―regardless of how you contracted the virus, you become nominally queer.‖ (154) As for the historical survey of AIDS in the early 1980s to 1990s see Jeffrey Weeks‘ Sex, Politic, and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. esp, 300-303.. 6.

(14) regard their homoerotic desire as ―diseased and inauthentic‖ (White, Aesthetics and Loss 8). Yet with the rise of the gay rights movement and the prominence of the HIV/AIDS issue in the 1970s and early 1980s, gay writers transform their subject matter to either react against the hegemony of the heteronormative values or to record the death from the plague of the AIDS/HIV in the gay community (Woods 368). To some extent Edmund White‘s gay fictions mentioned above display the panorama of the gay subjects who ―have been oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in. 治政大 and Loss 136). Given the the 1970s, and wiped out in the 1980s‖ (White, Aesthetics 立 ‧ 國. 學. wreck of AIDS 1980s onwards, the once natural and artificial body of the homosexual,‖ says White, has become ―feeble, yellowing, infected‖ (Aesthetics and. ‧ sit. y. Nat. Loss 135).. n. al. er. io. Nevertheless, most of the early AIDS writings of the 1980s remain. i n U. v. homophobic,7 treating AIDS as ―a disease [that] dare not speak its name‖. Ch. engchi. (Stambolian 2; Woodhouse 3). As such, AIDS is represented as the ―disease of theirs,‖ an infliction that will not cross the threshold if it is not given access (Dewey 30). However, Linda & Michael Hutcheon point out in ―Opera: Desire Disease Death‖ that,. 7. See how Joseph Dewey in ―Music for a Closing: Responses to AIDS in Three American Novels‖ considers these three novels as constituted of logic of withdrawal, which serve to attack AIDS and its carriers as the invaders from within the heterosexual boundary (27). Yet, Dewey accentuates more on Robert Ferro‘s Second Son (1988) to exemplify this logical withdrawal in relation to AIDS writing. (29-33). Also Woodhouse holds that Robert Ferro‘s fictions as that of assimilative literature, a fiction about gay men for straight readers, showing ―gay life within the implicit or explicit context of mainstream life, and tacitly appeared to mainstream value.‖ (3). 7.

(15) given the endeavors of gay activists since the late 80s in fighting against the sexual stigmatization of HIV/AIDS, recently aspire gay authors to draw upon the mode of ―countermythology‖ so as to either disrupt the stigmatized association of AIDS exclusively with homosexuals8 or to challenge the mis-representation of this disease in media (200-201). Likewise Lee Edelman suggests recent AIDS writings are intrinsic to and implicated in a postmodern mode, serving to destabilize the stigmatized representation by the dominant ideology, a sort of writing that struggles. 治政大 and their intended against ―the officially sanctioned representations of the epidemic 立 ‧ 國. 學. constitution of a ‗normal‘ or ‗healthy‘ subjectivity, to naturalize and reposition certain aspects of the ideological structures that inform and produce those noxious. ‧. sit. y. Nat. representations and oppressive subjectivities in the first place‖ (13).. n. al. er. io. Tony Purvis maintains that White‘s novels demonstrate how ―his treatment of. i n U. v. American and gay culture is inseparable from an examination of micro-histories set. Ch. engchi. against the wider backdrop‖ (314). His portrayals of individual gay characters either conforming to or resisting against the HIV-phobia social context are thus intricately. 8. Even though its narrative aspires to detach this plague from the homophobic association with gay identity by raising the possibility of heterosexual AIDS, still its narrative parallels with a popular discourse ―through certain contradictory impulse, reinfor[ing] the idea that gay men are somewhat most firmly and genuinely bound to AIDS and its origins‖ (111). As Steve Kruger attempts to defy the ontological logic in which AIDS is subsumed to the debased of the taxonomic system of heterosexual/homosexual, these narrative remains a homophobic ideology that recourses to differentiate the latter as a group of high risk, abjected /scapegoating others, as he puts it, its narratives nonetheless ―participate in broader homophobic constructions of AIDS as gay, also reflect a deep ambivalence among many gay men concerning about their relationship to AIDS‖ (124).. 8.

(16) linked to the wider background where the gay narrative has evolved. Similarly, Edmund White‘s own life experiences are also reflected in his novels, often in the form of ―disguised autobiography (Cohler 372).9 White admits himself that ―[t]he process starts even before I start writing. I live my life as if it‘s a book. I observe things that are happening to me knowing that I‘ll write about them later‖ (White, Burning Library 127). In an interview about his plan of writing The Married Man, White defines this fiction as another autobiographical writing about AIDS, mainly. 治政大Julian—are based on his own because the two HIV-positive characters—Austin and 立 ‧ 國. 學. experience with his late boyfriend Hubert during the late 1980s (82). To White, Hubert, who is French and a formerly married architect, is a Julian-like person in. ‧. sit. y. Nat. reality dying from the complications of AIDS. While his former autobiographical. n. al. er. io. novels often use the first-person narrative, The Married Man adopts a third-person. i n U. v. narrator, which allows the author to, for the first time, retain an omniscient perspective.. Ch. engchi. The Married Man opens with its main character, Austin Smith, an American furniture scholar living in Saint-Louis of France, falling into a painful dilemma, because of his homosexual desire for another French architect, Julian. Julian‘s married status is a mystery for Austin, in that he cannot make sure of Julian‘s sexual 9. Similar to Austin‘s serostatus of HIV positive in The Married Man, White himself has claimed to be a HIV positive since 1985. 9.

(17) orientation and whether Julian is indeed in love with him. But most significantly, Austin does not know whether he should tell Julian he is an HIV-positive if they begin to start this relationship. As an expatriate, Austin is aware of the different attitudes toward AIDs. While Americans are blunter toward speaking out their sexuality, French seems to be more reticent as to the very issue of HIV/AIDS: Americans sat up telling each other horror stories, but they were later astonished when their worst fantasies came true, as if they'd. 治政大 or by taking hoped to ward off evil by talking it into submission 立 ‧ 國. 學. homeopathic doses of it. The French, however, feared summoning an evil genius by pronouncing its name. Neither system worked.. ‧. sit. y. Nat. When the lioness awakened and felt the first hunger pains, she. er. io. would show her claws. (White, The Married Man 39). al. n. v i n Cwith After opting for the French approach h eJulian, i Udating with Julian without n g chehstarts hiding his HIV secret from his lover. Much to Austin‘s surprise, Julian not only forgives Austin‘s earlier reticence of his sero-status, but tells Austin that he determines to stay with him and take care of him as the HIV virus goes full-blown. Even though, Julian divorces his wife, however, their relationship is not as perfect as Austin has expected. As their relationship drags on, Julian‘s irreconcilable tension with Austin‘s ex-boyfriend, Peter—a now seriously ill HIV patient—makes Austin 10.

(18) recognize that Austin is rather a self-absorbed partner. Given some successive minor illness, Julian is advised by Austin that he should take an AIDS test in the hospital, and is later informed that Julian has been diagnosed as HIV positive. Since then, Austin and Julian‘s role has been reversed.10 While Julian‘s AIDS-related symptoms gradually wreck his body, Austin‘s asymptomatic status is far from sliding into full-blown AIDS symptoms—he still looks healthy and actually gains more weight than he can expect. Worried that he might have given his HIV virus to Peter and. 治政大the responsibility for taking Julian—who look like living dead—Austin now takes 立 ‧ 國. 學. care of them out of both his sense of guilty and love. Therefore HIV virus becomes a source that unites these three AIDS positive characters whose lives have turned out to. ‧. sit. y. Nat. be fleeting and vulnerable. In the final one hundred pages Austin and Julian. n. al. er. io. eventually decide to travel in Morocco as a final trip to remember their once-love and. i n U. v. the attendant death. It is in the deep desert of Sahara—a region that the medical. Ch. engchi. knowledge is still ignorant of the treatment of AIDS—that Julian dies, leaving Austin to face his solitude and the unknown future. The Married Man ends up with an undertone for the surviving Austin that his future can still be promising if he does not give himself up eventually.. 10. While Julien is served as a person that takes care of Austin in the beginning of the story, his later succumbing to AIDS renders him a patient that instead needs Austin‘s care. 11.

(19) Judith Halberstam‘s ―In a Queer Time & Place‖ defines queer temporality as a time model opposed to the linear frame of ―bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance,‖ a time frame practiced and experienced by queer subjects in order to counter the institutions of heteronormative discourse from within the value of capital-family ideology11 (6-10). Inspired by Halberstam‘s concept of queer temporality, I mean to suggest contemporary gay novels ostensibly echo this theoretical concept as an alternative time frame not only transcending the. 治政大AIDS/HIV experience. value of utilitarianism but responding to the anxiety over the 立 ‧ 國. 學. To the extent that the Holocaust of AIDS has evoked much panic within the homosexual community, some AIDS literary writings have, on the one hand, become. ‧. sit. y. Nat. a mode manifesting the nature of queer temporality by embodying gay characters‘. n. al. er. io. orgiastic, transient lives, transforming HIV virus into not so much a negative. i n U. v. metaphor as a positive theme for their readers (Halberstam 12). On the other hand,. Ch. engchi. such writings employ the biological characteristic of HIV virus in transcoding the infected body into another identity,12 with which the queer kinship becomes possible. Anthropologist Roy Wanger contends that with technological development the concept of kinship breaks with the frame of biological essentialism, shifting into a 11. The concept of queer temporality, along with its register of non-reproductive mode of sexual pleasure is highly associated with George Bataille‘s ―excessive expenditure‖ in relation to perverted sexual practices as opposed to the exploit of capital utilitarianism, an association which will be developed in the following section (51). 12 Unlike other kinds of virus, Waldby argues the HIV virus serves to ―replace[s] the human genetic ‗identity‘ of the cells it infects‖ (19-20). 12.

(20) dynamic process of differentiating relational categories that thereby enables a flow of relatedness among them (qtd. in Carsten 38). The HIV virus, thus, has become a source within AIDS writings to re-invite the ―viral consanguinity,‖ an alternative kinship that is organized by its AIDS homosexual members to share their concern for one another (Dean 91).13 As such the body of the homosexual with the serostatus HIV should be recognized as a nexus in which the axis of queer time—progressing from sex, disease, to death— and queer kinship is sustained.. 立. 政治大. With the rise of the HIV/AIDS discourse, AIDS wirings have become one of. ‧ 國. 學. the most crucial topics subsumed to the gay literature. As Suzanna Poirier puts it, ―All. ‧. writing today is AIDS writing in that it must consciously choose how to respond to. Nat. io. sit. y. the epidemic, whether by direct involvement or evasion‖ (Poirier 7). White‘s The. er. Married Man is a disease writing dealing with the topic of HIV/AIDS, a novel. al. n. v i n whereby White draws on hisC personal to narrate the social context of AIDS h e nexperience gchi U in the late 1980s. As such I argue that the subjectivity of the homosexuals in The Married Man is intervened by the HIV virus, and that two different types of HIV-positive bodies in that novel are employed as a strategy in which the biomedical 13. Dean‘s controversial book, Unlimited Intimacy, contends that bareback sex can be acknowledged as a subversive strategy for the strength of the gay subculture, in that with the communication of the HIV virus among the gay male body, it is possible that an organic queer kinship can be thus re-invented (89-96). Even though the sex in The Married Man is obviously not that of bareback—on the contrary, this novel depicts the moral panic context of the late 1980s into which the regulation of the safer sex is embedded—Dean‘s subversive idea is sill appropriated here as to argue that the communication of the HIV virus among the characters in this novel can be seen as a source—but not a deliberate strategy—for the establishment of the alternative kinship in such disease writing. 13.

(21) discourse concerning the homosexual body is further complicated. Thus in chapter two I will discuss that due to the emergence of the AIDS/HIV in the mid-80s, the subversive nature of homosexual sex has been problematized and intervened by the policy of safer sex, while the second part will discuss that the ambiguous presentation of the HIV positive bodies in The Married Man serves as a literary strategy to challenge the legitimacy of the biomedical discourse in relation to the subjectivity of the homosexuals.. 立. 政治大. Homosexual sex in White‘s The Married Man will be my focus in chapter two.. ‧ 國. 學. Foucault argues that with the rise of scientia sexualis in the mid-18th century the. ‧. regime of instrumental reason has attempted to deploy the biomedical language as a. Nat. io. sit. y. plausible discourse through which the body of one subject becomes permeatable, a. er. subject whose sexual pleasure is displaced under the name of desire, as a nexus for. al. n. v i n C h of the panopticon interpretation, regulated by the mechanism e n g c h i U –―polymorphous. conducts [are] actually extracted from people‘s bodies and from their pleasure…[to be] drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices‖ (47-48). To the extent that the emergence of the HIV/AIDS discourse in the early 1980s has exaggerated the regulation of the homosexual body, the HIV virus thereby not only problematizes the homosexual‘s sexual desire, but renders his body a spectacle to be surveillanced by the gaze of the biomedical discourse (Crawford 1348). 14.

(22) Such surveillance emphasizes that safer sex among gay community is the best policy for the prevention of AIDS/HIV. Related to this issue, Elizabeth Grosz holds in her ―Sexed Body‖ that the exchange of bodily fluids is the most natural gesture to breach the physical boundary between people, ―a borderline state, disruptive of the solidity of thing, entities, and object. . .tracing the paths of entry or exist, the routes of interchange or traffic with the world‖ (192). Yet, bodily semen, says Grosz, is a fluid recognized by the heterosexual male as a substance that is bound only to be. 治政大his privileged sexed territory by discharged from his body border as a way to ‗extend‘ 立 ‧ 國. 學. disseminating this seed unto the female body. As such, bodily semen, for the heterosexual male, is mere fluid to be ejaculated out of his body border, not. ‧. sit. y. Nat. something which he incorporates. By so doing, he keeps his body orifices closed and. er. io. static, constituting himself as ―as active agent in the transmission of flow,‖ a subject. n. al. i n U. v. who is only to give but never to receive (Grosz, 201). As opposed to the heterosexual. Ch. 14. male‘s static body orifices,. engchi. the homosexual male conceives his body orifices as. dynamic entries for exchange of the body fluids which is ―prepared not only to send out but also to receive,‖ a substance which is ―permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opens itself up rather than seals itself off, that is prepared to respond as well as to initiate‖ (Grosz 201). Yet with the emergence of the AIDS crisis, the openings of the 14. Similar to Grosz‘s contention, Catherine Waldby considers the male heterosexual body as the ―idealised phallic body,‖ a body whose orifices are neither to take nor give (AIDS) infections (13). 15.

(23) homosexual male body are problematized, and their seminal rendered so ambiguous that the autonomy of his body is further questioned within the discourse of safer sex policy.. Yet, with the emergence of the HIV/AIDS narrative, this once golden age of hedonist and promiscuous lifestyle in gay culture between the late 1960s and the early 1980s —a lifestyle of which some gay theorists of the Pre-AIDS era consider as the. 政治大. most effective strategy to undermine the politic of heteonormativity—has been. 立. problematized by the policy of safer sex since mid-1980s. The very nature of gay. ‧ 國. 學. excessiveness has been discouraged and distorted, thereby transforming their. ‧. subversive practice into self-surveillance and autoeroticism. Thus, The Married Man. Nat. io. sit. y. is such a text in which the excessive nature of gay sex is problematized by the threat. er. of HIV virus and its attendant policy of safer sex. In chapter two I will discuss with. al. n. v i n the emergence of HIV virus Austin C represents hedonist generation of 1970s who is h e n the gchi U. caught in the overlap of the promiscuous past and the safer sex at the present, recognized as thesis and antithesis, respectively. It is from this Hegelian dialectics that eventually leads Austin to learn the very synthesis of love and responsibility for not only for himself but others in time of AIDS. In chapters three and four, I will discuss how the two distinguished types of HIV positive bodies—the grotesque body and the closet body, respectively—depicted in 16.

(24) The Married Man are used to either arouse empathy from its readers toward the issue of HIV/AIDS or to invert the HIV narrative by blurring the biomedical boundary of healthy/diseased body. The grotesque body, as opposed to the classical body situated as high, inside, homogeneous, and symmetrical, marks the marginal, the low and the outside. Such a body, says Bakhtin, serves the purpose of turning the symbolic hierarchy of high and low upside down through its strength of ―lower bodily stratum‖ and the openings of the body orifices (317). As Stallybrass & White put it, such. 治政大 belly and buttocks, the grotesqueness emphasizes ―the gaping mouth, the protuberant 立 ‧ 國. 學. feet and the genitals…as a mobile, split, multiple self‖ (22). To Bakhtin, it is due to the openings of the body orifices that this grotesque image transcends beyond the. ‧ sit. y. Nat. social constraints, making itself a social body:. n. al. er. io. The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world…it. i n U. v. is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgressing its own limits. The. Ch. engchi. stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world…which the body itself goes out to meet the world. (26) Yet, this Bakhtinian grotesque image is quite contrary to that of the serostatus homosexual, whose body orifices are both discursively regulated and gazed at by the biomedical discourse. Laughter, for them, is such an extravagant expression. In contrast to the Bakhtinian grotesque body—an image of life-affirming—the other type 17.

(25) of grotesque body is essentially ―the sphere of the unfathomable, a familiar world in the process of dissolution or estrangement, diffusing an aura that instills insecurity, revulsion, and the terror and causes the disintegration of our sense of soundness, symmetry, and proportion‖ (Meindl 15). While the Bakhtinian grotesque image emphasizes the effect of laughter, what this Kayserian grotesqueness evokes is anxiety. Wolfgang Kayser argues that the grotesque is a fundamentally ambivalent thing, as a violent clash of opposites, embodying the problematical nature of existence (3). As he. 治政大 contrast between form puts it, the image of the grotesque is ―constituted by a clashing 立 ‧ 國. 學. and content, the unstable mixture of heterogeneous elements, the explosive force of the paradoxical, which is both ridiculous and terrifying‖ (53). Such grotesqueness,. ‧. sit. y. Nat. says Philip Thomas, will become the prevalent topic in certain societies and eras. n. al. er. io. ―marked by strife, radical change or disorientation‖ (11). Given its visual effect of. i n U. v. shock and terrifying, this grotesque body tends to be recognized as an aggressive. Ch. engchi. weapon for de-familiarizing, as well as disorienting people‘s perspective of the normal contour, a body which is conceived as both aggressiveness and alienation in the sight of its spectacle (Thomas 58-59). The AIDS period is such a radical era that the contour of human body has become grotesquized. Therefore, the HIV body with distinguished AIDS-related symptoms on their face or body should be recognized as a grotesque image, a pathologized body that is metaphorically conceived as distortion 18.

(26) and chaos, as opposed to the organic, healthy body of the heterosexual self (Brouwer 363). Given its aggressive look, such a diseased body is nevertheless endowed with the weapon of ―rhetoric power‖ for provoking its audience to gaze and to be shocked (Hauser 135). Therefore, I consider the bodies of Peter and Julian in White‘s The Married Man that are invested with distinct AIDS-related syndrome–Kaposi‘s sarcoma and lymphomas—should be recognized as the grotesque body. By adopting the immersive writing style15 in depicting the horror of AIDS in The Married Man,. 治政 Edmund White uses these grotesque body images as大 a literary weapon to accuse the 立 ‧ 國. 學. legitimatized self—be that heterosexual or the non-AIDS homosexuals—of the ignorance, detachment or homophobic hostility toward the issue of AIDS/HIV and its. ‧ sit. y. Nat. victims.. n. al. er. io. The second type of the positive HIV body in The Married Man is the closet. i n U. v. body. The closet body is sustained by the ambiguous attribute of HIV virus that serves. Ch. engchi. to question the biomedical discourse in defining our body boundary. Therefore, the metaphor of closet can be recognized as an image to exemplify Austin‘s ambiguous body—an asymptomatic carrier body which shows no AIDS-related syndromes on its physical contour— which is interiorly similar yet exteriorly different as compared with that of the grotesque, a body that is both exteriorly and interiorly entrapped. 15. See Joseph Cady‘s definition as to the immersive writing in relation to AIDS/HIV (258-62). 19.

(27) under the biomedical narrative of HIV/AIDS discourse. As such, Austin‘s closet body can be served as a mediation to further problematize the biomedical border of health/disease in relation to AIDS/HIV discourse, a body that blurs readers‘ boundary of consciousness between hope and despair, future and no future.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. 20. i n U. v.

(28) CHAPTER 2 Dialectics of Gay Sex in Edmund White‘s AIDS Writing. 政治大. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, when medicine acquired the. 立. powerful status of science, the health/disease dichotomy has become one of the. ‧ 國. 學. prevailing metaphors for such symbolic boundaries between an ordered inside and. ‧. an abject outside. Today, the AIDS crisis, affecting primarily categories of people. Nat. io. sit. y. already constructed as diseased has been seen as a brutal reinforcement of this. er. metaphor. Given this symbolic boundary within the language of bio-medicine, gay. al. n. v i n men are rendered the abject C other, h ea group i Ubecome the helpless mice whose n g cthath has subjectivity is relinquished to the medical profession (Lynch 40). Though attacked by Larry Kramer and Reed Woodhouse as too explicit in depicting gay hedonist freedom in his fiction during the time of the Epidemic,16 Edmund White responds to Kramer‘s attack that as an insider to the gay community,. 16. Attacking on White‘s celebration of promiscuous life-style written in The Joy of Gay Sex, both. Larry Kramer and Reed Woodhouse use their moralist standard to fault White‘s ―bad timing‖ in promoting the sex freedom for his gay community in the time of AIDS (Kramer, 17; Woodhouse, 3). 21.

(29) a vivid writing of gay life experience should not be ignored, because the theme of love and death should be most obviously discussed in the time of the Epidemic. Thus his AIDS writings not only depict people who suffer but also the panorama of the gay hedonist lifestyle (Burning Library 237). Les Brookes gives Edmund White‘s gay stories and AIDS writings a positive criticism, primarily because he considers the conspicuous portrayal of gay sex in AIDS writings serves to challenge the homophobic discourse in the time of the Epidemic, a writing strategy that has wrought. 治政大is always already a political agenda against a discourse in which the gay subject 立 ‧ 國. 學. disease:. These stories of Edmund White are not assimilative in the sense of. ‧. sit. y. Nat. seeing AIDS as a reason to abandon gay political agendas in. n. al. er. io. surrender to moral panic. On the contrary, they suggest a. i n U. v. reassertion of gay identity as part of a broadly radical stance given. Ch. engchi. new energy precisely in face of the threat of AIDS. (7) These AIDS stories, as Brookes contends, pose a challenge to previous AIDS writings wherein AIDS becomes a sensational and hilarious parody, drawing on an approach that resists paranoia and apocalyptic brooding, while remaining sensitive to the change, personal suffering, and loss the epidemic has brought (159). Recognized as the most influential writer among critics whose autobiographic novels touch exclusively on the out-come story and AIDS writings, Edmund White achieves his 22.

(30) best, as David Bergman holds, in his The Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man, the last two novels of his terrorlogy (237). This thesis discusses Edmund White‘s The Married Man as a text that represents how its gay characters are confronted with the biomedical gaze of AIDS and argues that White‘s AIDS writing has always been a space wherein the subjectivity of the characters has been regulated by the regime of safe sex, and wherein the dialect of sex/death becomes more contradictory and ambivalent than his. 治政大a narrative that depicts its previous gay/AIDS writings, The Farewell Symphony, 立 ‧ 國. 學. characters‘ struggle over the rupture between the promiscuous/hesdonist past and safe- sex/ascetic present.. ‧ sit. y. Nat. Social Making of AIDS. n. al. er. io. Viewed from the lens of sociology, as a nexus where multiple meanings, stories,. i n U. v. and discourses intersect, overlap, reinforce, and subvert one another, AIDS has been. Ch. engchi. incorporated into a narrative of bio-medicine that draws on its scientific language and political interest wherein certain gendered and sexualized bodies have become the materials for imaginative interpretations (Waldby 2-10). As Lorna Rhodes argues, AIDS has been subject to an aura of factuality in terms of bio-medicine, an abstract notion that is guided by a confident conceptualization of AIDS as a distinct, discrete and disjunctive entity that exists within individual bodies (172). This biomedical conceptualization has made AIDS not so much a naive disease as something of social 23.

(31) making, subject to a power relation.17 The bodies of these heightened risk groups with their dangerous permeability, according to biomedical intervention, refer especially to those of IV drug users, and male homosexuals, an discursive dichotomy that takes on ambiguity, homophobia, stereotypes, double-thinking, them-versus-us, blame-the-victim, wishful thinking in relation to the structure of gender and sexuality (Treichler 37).18 Following the narrative of modern medicine constructed within the discourse of bio-power,. 19. 治政 argues Michel Foucault, the body of gay men大 has been considered by 立 ‧ 國. 學. the bio-scientists as the double of perversity and danger in the realm of medical-judicial discourse,20 a category of abnormality by which the health of the. ‧ y. Nat. Similarly, this biomedical discourse of AIDS reflects a gendered structure of ideological. sit. 17. er. io. intervention, ―[m]oving from biological to social etiology, the making social of AIDS includes assessment of the social conditions that directly or indirectly put individuals at heightened risk for the. n. al. i n U. v. social constructions of medicine as politics, as institution, and as ideology‖ (Waldby 16). Likewise. Ch. engchi. Simon Watney holds that AIDS involves a ―a crisis of representation,‖ a signifier that has been used as ―pretext‖ throughout the West to justify calls increasing legislation and regulation of those considered to be socially unacceptable (3). 18. See Catherine Waldby and Elizabeth Grosz argue this biomedical discourse has appropriated the. mechanism of gender structure wherein only the phallic body can stand unproblematic for the intact body of the nation. 19. See Michael Foucault‘s The History of Sexuality Vol .1 for the definition of the birth of bio-power in. maintaining the population in which continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms are used by the dominant discourse, a technology manipulated by the dominant discourse whereby ―an explicit boundary of healthy norms and diseased others are distinguished‖ (142-44). 20. Steve Epstein appropriates Foucault‘s concept of panoptics arguing a sense of fear in sex provoked. by biomedical discourse of AIDS has rendered gay community the internalization of discipline in relation to their subjectivity onto their conscious, a political strategy of simply disseminating scientific knowledge in a ―downward‖ direction that transforms ―the recipient of knowledge into an object of 24.

(32) entire population is threatened: On the one hand, there is the notion of ‗perversion‘ that will enable the series of medical concepts and the series of juridical concepts to be stitched together and, on the other hand, there is the notion of ‗danger,‘ of the ‗dangerous individual,‘ which will make possible the justification and theoretical foundation of an uninterrupted chain of medico-judicial institutions. (34). 治政大discourse continues, AIDS has As this essential theoretical core of medico-legal 立 ‧ 國. 學. been represented as the most threatening epidemic to our society since it was first reported in the early 1980s. The gay male body has become a problematic super-text. ‧. sit. y. Nat. deciphered and governed by this new medical gaze (Elbe 403),21 a text whose erotic. n. al. er. io. and sexual life is disciplined and surveillanced through the deployment of various. i n U. v. imaging and diagnostic technologies, biomedical technologies that fulfill panoptic. Ch. engchi. aspirations as visualized by the macroscopic and the microscopic relation between the individual and nation bodies (Waldby 15). David Caron holds that AIDS writings should be recognized as spaces in which. power‖ (5 emphasis mine). 21. Medical gaze is a concept used by Foucault in Birth of Clinic, violence which legitimates the. subject (doctor)/object (patient) relation and freezes it in the objectivity of medical discourse, a discourse constantly reinforced by the authority it enjoys far beyond the field of medicine. Also, Elbe considers the biomedical discourse of AIDS emerged after 1980s positions as a neo medical gaze reminiscent of nineteenth-century medicine. 25.

(33) the medical gaze, with its violence illustrates how the homosexual body has been represented as a locus where the subject projects his morbid fantasies in a violent process of domination (241). This medical gaze, however, is dynamic and beyond the binary opposition of the power relationship between doctor/patient and heterosexual/homosexual. Accordingly, AIDS writings reflect the fact that not only do the dominant cultures hold the authority of a medical gaze, but that it is gay men themselves that have been interpellated and internalized by this gaze as a means to regulate the sexed body within.. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. David Bergman appropriates Deleuze and Guattari‘s notion of minor literature and argues that gay literature, as opposed to great literature, functions as a unique. ‧. sit. y. Nat. genre where ―every individual is immediately plugged into politics,‖ a textual space. n. al. er. io. wherein the question of the individual responds to and challenges the politics of sex. i n U. v. intervened by the discourse of bio-medicine (21). Most of the AIDS writings have. Ch. engchi. become a space in which the politics of hedonism of gay subjectivity in the 1970s has been de-sexualized by the dominant culture and even the gay writers themselves. In the same vein, Edmund White considers that the emergence of AIDS has rendered gay subjects detached and alienated from sex among one another, ―we [gay subjects] do feel weird again, despised, alien. There‘s talk of tattooing us or quarantining us. . . The Brassy hedonism of a few years back has given way to a protective gay invisibility‖ (Bergman 213). This discourse of bio-medicine as to HIV/AIDS thus 26.

(34) threats the very existence of the gay movement itself. As Edmund White contends this discourse has posed a great danger to a political identity around gay sexuality, ―[w]hen a society based on sex and expression is de-eroticized [by the dominant discourse of medicine], its very reason for being can vanish‖ (Burning Library 214). As a insider in the gay community, White holds that he has an urgent responsibility for representing how gay subjects have been disciplined and interpellated by the biomedical discourse of AIDS in his novels, ―AIDS seemed to push everything. 治政 backwards to an age when the only ones who were 大 talking about male homosexuals 立 ‧ 國. 學. were doctors who weren‘t gay and didn‘t identify as gays. They were discussing us in a very clinical way as though we were guinea pigs—‗objects‘‖ (Burning Library 241).. ‧. sit. y. Nat. Therefore, AIDS writings have turned to discuss this biomedical discourse as to. n. al. er. io. homophobia and AIDS-phobia issue. According to Emmanuel Nelson, the gay male. i n U. v. body has been encoded by this dominant culture as a problematic super text that has. Ch. engchi. made ―the political ramifications even more troublesome. . . . an object of massive public curiosity and relentless cultural inquiry. . . [and] is now widely perceived as a site of mysterious and fatal infections‖ (2). As opposed to this biomedical discourse, Nelson holds that gay writers should translate their anger and grief toward this epidemic as the gravely personal issue into AIDS writings that takes on the techniques of ―re-creating pain but framing it in a transcendent vision; of articulating a resistant, activist consciousness instead of merely helpless, paralyzing angst‖ (2). Thus Edmund 27.

(35) White‘s The Married Man should be viewed as Nelson‘s problematic super text in which the sexed/diseased body of gay men has been examined in a dynamic power relationship by a biomedical gaze.. Biomedical Gaze and Voyeurism of the AIDS Body In White‘s The Married Man the biomedical gaze upon gay males is translated into the technology of HIV test, a positive test result, that ushers the tested into a state. 治政大 a ―medical of permanent intuitional visibility, inserting the gay tested into 立 ‧ 國. 學. management‘s regime‖ (Waldby 122).22 Throughout The Married Man its gay characters are targeted by this biomedical discourse, living under the shadow of. ‧. sit. y. Nat. paranoia, ambivalently assuming their identity as virus. Peter, Austin‘s former HIV. n. al. er. io. positive lover, represents an aversion against the de-humanized biomedical. i n U. v. imagination of bio-medicine in identifying the body of the gay community with HIV. Ch. engchi. virus. He lashes out his anger, claiming that gay males themselves have been threatened to live with this gaze, ―Peter, a genuine escapist, had objected to the whole process [of HIV test,] arguing Austin would be thrown out of France if positive and sent home to the States in legs irons‖ (37). White speaks of this panoptics-like system 22. According to Waldby HIV test represents the solution to the problem of the invisibility of the HIV. virus in both the body and the body politic. Through the inscription of a transmission identity upon the possible seropositive, gay males, this test renders the virus visible, a new identity as virus that does not endanger the health of the body politic (139).. 28.

(36) through Peter‘s irrational attitude toward this HIV technology, ―In Sweden, they‘re [the authority] sending seropositivity to prison island. . . . In Munich they test you at the border and to stay in India more than a month you must undergo a blood test‖ (37). This technology of HIV test thus become a new discursive technique of governments echoing Foucault‘s concept of the truth of sexuality, offering up the truth for scientific/rational administration, whereby subjects are classified and socially ordered through the securing of confession as to the ―‗truth‘ of their sexuality‖ (Waldby 113).. 治政大of biomedical language, serving This confession is fulfilled through the representation 立 ‧ 國. 學. as a technology of the self internalized within the consciousness of the gay subjects. Thus the gesture of checkup the symptoms of their body becomes a daily routine for. ‧ sit. y. Nat. themselves:. n. al. er. io. The worst thing was studying one‘s body every morning in the. i n U. v. shower for auguries. Even in that regard he envied all those. Ch. engchi. hysterical gay guys back in New York or San Francisco who knew to become alarmed about the slightly raised, wine-colored blemish, not the flat, black mole or whatever, who could tell just when a cough became ‗persistent‘ enough to be worrying or whether a damp pillowcase and a wet head counted as ‗night sweats‘ (38). Still, responding to Catherine Waldby‘s challenge against the truth of HIV testing, White has Austin questioned about the authority of HIV testing, wondering 29.

(37) whether this technique merely stands for a trick which renders gay males visible, a technology only serving to withdraw their subjectivity, ―Austin felt that he‘d gained nothing by knowing [the result of the HIV test]. . . He‘d had a cheerfully defiant conviction that learning the truth is always liberating . . . but he‘d come to doubt his democratic frankness, his ‗transparency‘. . . he‘d learned not to blurt out whatever happened to be passing through his mind [and] he‘d started to shy away from bold declarations of facts‖ (38). Truth, in light of Austin‘s challenge, becomes an apparatus. 治政大 sexed body, that fulfills biomedical voyeurism, serving to anatomize certain 立 ‧ 國. 學. paralyzing their subjectivity, as Cindy Patton argues in Inventing AIDS, that renders ―the person with AIDS speaks for the virus, becomes the taking virus‖ (25 emphasis. ‧ sit. y. Nat. mine):. n. al. er. io. ―He [doctor] wanted me to have the test‖ ―The test?‖ Austin asked stupidly ―The AIDS test‖. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. ―Why?‖ ―Because he‘s worried about my acne and my cough and that wart I have on my penis.‖ (52) The number of T-cells is another apparatus used by the biomedical discourse of AIDS, serving to interpellate and regulate the subjectivity of gay males. The imagination of bio medicine has transformed T-cells into a gendered cell, into ―a kind 30.

(38) of viral representative, precipitating a series of catastrophic events‖ (Waldby 69). The ―homosexualization‖ of the T cells means that infected cells represent a promiscuous life of the past. Internalizing this regime, gay subjects use the number of T-cells, a technology of the self,23 to define themselves, seeing to one another. In The Married Man, all of the gay characters live under the shadow wherein T-cell numbers become a biomedical apparatus to regulate their body boundary: ―I talked to the doctor at the Hospital Saint-Louis today and he wants me. 治政 to redo my tests, but he says they‘re not very大 promising.‖ 立 ‧ 國. 學. ―He thinks you‘re positive?‖. ―Not just positive, but my T-cells are very down, just above one. ‧. n. al. er. io. ―A thousand, you mean. Normal is one thousand.‖. sit. y. Nat. hundred.‖. i n U. ―How many do you have? How many T-cells.‖. Ch. engchi. v. ―Seven hundred.‖ Austin said. ―Something like that.‖ ―I guess you‘re lucky. You must be one of the rare lucky ones.‖ ―My time will come.‖(145-46) In White‘s AIDS writings the numbers of T-cell are thus represented not so much as a 23. Catherine Waldby holds such technology disseminated within biomedical discourse can be viewed. as that of inscription, a technology that is ―not just of subjection but of subjectification, a technology which not only compels subjects in certain ways but which also induces the internalization of new norms of identity and self-management, above all the management of one‘s health and one‘s sexual practices‖ (113 emphasis mine). 31.

(39) biomedical term but as a material of self-discipline and self-management of gay men themselves. Acted as a resistant gesture opposed to this biomedical discourse, Austin‘s self-exile to France becomes a gesture of elusiveness against this biomedical gaze disseminating in America of the late 1980s, ―cut off from America, from the massive protests and the underground treatment newsletters. . .and the organized safe-sex and massage sessions, far from the hysteria and the solace‖ (38). Even though Austin flees. 治政大of the biomedical gaze to Europe, ―pretending‖ his body has escaped the regulation 立 ‧ 國. 學. fettering his gay fellows in America, his body has been inscribed by this gaze rooting in his deep consciousness. The threat of AIDS becomes a symbol of a gluttonous. ‧. sit. y. Nat. lioness waiting for her prey to come: ―Austin did not know what to think of this. n. al. er. io. disease that had taken them by chance, as though he had awakened to find himself in. i n U. v. a cave under the heavy paw of a lioness, who was licking him for the moment and. Ch. engchi. breathing all over him with her gamy, carrion smell but who was capable of showing her claws and devouring him today . . . or tomorrow‖ (37-38). Responding to the rhetoric of the biomedical discourse which equates gay sex with death, sex between/among gay characters in AIDS writings has been represented as an act of guilt, a fantasy contaminated by fatalism that gay subjects themselves should train to sublime. As Austin runs across a sexy guy whose ―lean, muscle legs and the compact torso‖ arouses his sexual desire, he has to keep 32.

(40) warming himself of the possible HIV virus hosting within the guy and of the consequence of sex accordingly: ―[w]hen he was younger, in the pre-AIDS days, he seldom hesitated to touch another man seductively, a big grin on his face, but now he‘d trained himself to recognize that. . . other men were more reticent sexually than he‖ (25). Living under the slogan of biomedical discourse interpellating gay subjects and equating their sex with virus and death, gay males internalize this norm as a sense of fear of their homoerotic sex as ―a deadly game‖ and ―gambling‖. 治政大symptoms of a cough, what (51). Similarly, when Julien appears to have some 立 ‧ 國. 學. comes to Austin‘s mind is whether their previous sex experience had obeyed the principles of safe sex instructed in the pamphlets: ―[m]entally he [Austin] ran. ‧. sit. y. Nat. through all their sexual positions over the weekend but could find nothing unsafe.. n. al. er. io. He hadn‘t let Julien suck him. They‘d kissed, but was that dangerous? Julien had. i n U. v. held their erect penises close together in his hand, but surely that wasn‘t ‗at risk‘. Ch. engchi. behavior, as the pamphlets called it. Or was it?‖ (51). Thus under the discipline of the biomedical gaze, the act of sex is transformed into that of guilt. When Julien is diagnosed as HIV positive, a deep sense of guilt flashes into Austin‘s mind as to the danger of sex they once experienced: ―Austin was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. He tried to remember all the times they‘d had sex. On perhaps five or six occasions they‘d been seriously stoned. Could he have slipped up and touched Julien‘s ass with a fingertip which he‘d doused in his own precum?‖ (146). 33.

(41) Dialectics of Promiscuity and Safer Sex Sexual behavior has been an essential element in gay fiction, an expression of liberation encouraged by the Stonewall uprising and the larger sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.24 Still, the emergence of AIDS has made the writing of sex more contradictory than an act of rebellion and celebration of the new freedom. Because AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, and because personal behavior plays the role it does, the politics and passion the subject generates are. 治政大gay community. On the explosive, in real life and in fiction, inside and outside of the 立 ‧ 國. 學. larger stage, because of AIDS, every act of gay sex and every piece of writing involving gay sex seems to stake out a political and moral position. AIDS writing thus. ‧. sit. y. Nat. becomes a space in which an individual judges and condemns others for their sexual. n. al. er. io. choices between safer sex/unsafe sex and the monogamy/promiscuity among gay. i n U. v. subjects are foregone (Benedict 73). The nature of gay sex, as Edmund White puts it,. Ch. engchi. has been further undermined by the appearance of AIDS as opposed to the liberation of gay sex gained in the 1970s: I bet there‘s very little gay sex that isn‘t shadowed by shame. I think AIDS brought that back into relief, because for those people who were just beginning to get finally adjusted to the idea that it 24. Certain homosexual writers have engaged in what Foucault terms a ‗reverse‘ discourse, whereby. ―homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‗naturality‘ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary by which it was [. . .] disqualified‖ (101). 34.

(42) was okay to be gay, AIDS came along and said, ―No, you were right in the first place. Sex is dirty, it‘s a disease, you are wrong, it‘s against nature.‖ AIDS really returned the adult gay man to his nerdy adolescence. It made you feel isolated, weird, as if you were really doing the wrong thing. (27) Audre Lorde once wrote of the strength of homo-erotic representation in literature, suggesting the joy and fullness sprouting from sex is not unrelated to the. 治政大of our lives, we begin to demand politics. Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects 立 ‧ 國. 學. from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us and. ‧. sit. y. Nat. becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to. n. al. er. io. evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives (Lorde 57).. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Still, the nature of gay promiscuity25 has been debated along with the appearance of AIDS. While one views gay promiscuity as genocidal, the other may suggest 25. Promiscuity originally derives from the Latin miscere, meaning ―to mix‖. Although this term has,. throughout its history, contained both derogatory and more unassuming meanings, nowhere has this been more the case than in the primarily eroticized deployment of the term within late nineteen and twentieth-century sexological, legal, literary and popular discourse. Promiscuity now conventionally connotes ―excessive and often ―insatiable sexual practices (Gove 6). Still, as Gayle Rubin argues, it is not ―promiscuity‖ per se that is usually condemned within normative discourses, but rather, the promiscuous sexuality of specific cultural groups—particularly, promiscuous gay men (26). See also Steven Seidman in Romantic Language contending the nature of gay subculture is generally assumed as ―the inherently promiscuous. . . a sign of its pathological or deviant status‖ (169). 35.

(43) abandoning that promiscuity as genocidal.26 Though gay promiscuity has been contaminated by the dominant ideology as a sign of disease and of infection,27 the promise of gay promiscuity of the 1970s—free sex, better sex, sex without guilt, sex without repression, sex at home, and sex in the street—thus provides what Lorde suggests a sense of fullness that empowers the gay community, a political strategy that helps to increase ―the beginnings of our sense of self‖ (54). As opposed to the monogamous sex normalized within the mechanism of heterosexuality, gay. 治政大 of queer promiscuity stands for a liberator and transgressive connotation 立 ‧ 國. 學. counter-practice, a political practice that transcends the repressed fantasies, desire and subjectivity to which it can be applied (Gove 19). This counter-praxis of sex,. ‧. sit. y. Nat. non-monogamous sexuality, therefore represents an avoidance of constrictive gender. n. al. er. io. roles, and an exploration of new ways of bonding. Sexual experimentation was a. i n U. v. means whereby gay men could free themselves of societal-imposed notions of guilt. Ch. engchi. and shame around homo-eroticism. Dennis Altman, in addition, mentions this. 26. While Larry Kramer contends gay promiscuity may result in the genocidal, Gabriel Rotello argues. in Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, gay culture ceases to exist once we relinquish some sexual freedom. 27. Leo Bersani argues the nature of promiscuity, even before the emergence of AIDS, has been. regarded as a sign of disease, ―an unquenchable appetite for destruction‖ as men spread their legs up for other men (211).Similarly Susan Sontag holds in The Metaphor of AIDS the representation of safer sex explicitly contains a connoted language of sexphobia and homophobia, a discourse that views gay sex per se as an act needs relinquished, ―[t]rue of syphilis, this is even truer of AIDS, since not just promiscuity but a specific sexual ‗practice‘ regarded as unnatural is named as more endangered. . . . a sexual practice [that] is thought to be more willful, therefore deserves more blame‖ (26). 36.

(44) promiscuity shared among the gay community serves to transform the negative suggestion into a positive connotation of political strategy whereby the dominant ideology of heteronormativity is challenged: ―[promiscuity] can be seen as a sort of Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in a type of brotherhood far removed from the male bonding of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterizes much of the outside world‖ (79-80). Still Eric Rofes considers the discourse of AIDS renders a rupture28 among the. 治政大shared among the gay gay community, suggesting the once promiscuous life 立 ‧ 國. 學. community of the 1970s, a period that spans from the protest of post-stone to the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, has been distorted and re-pathologized by. ‧. sit. y. Nat. AIDS-phobic politics. Thus the politics of promiscuity drawn on by gay subjects as an. n. al. er. io. oppositional strategy against heteronormativity of the 1970s has been re-defined as a. i n U. v. chaotic history and irresponsible past, ―[w]e are told that the 1970s were a time of. Ch. engchi. selfishness, excesses, decadence, and self-abuse. . . We pathologize the men and the culture of the 1970s from what we consider the superior morality of the 1990s‖ (Rofes 104). This new morality emerging along with the appearance of AIDS not only. 28. See Ed Cohen arguing how the emergence of AIDS has sprouted a dis-continuum as to gay. subjectivity, an ideological interpellation that is evident in a new procedure of subject formation, ―[g]ay men struggled daily against a culture that believed them to be pathological. . . what gay men had once viewed as a healthy desire for sex was reinterpreted as a pathological desire for dangerous sex, regardless of whether individual acts might be considered ‗safe,‘ a re-repression used by dominant regime renders gay sex not only heterosexualized but not really gay, not really a man (107). 37.

(45) renders the survivors of AIDS of an older generation overwhelmed with a sense of despair and guilt about the rupture of sexual worlds of the past, a predicament that ―whether HIV positive, HIV negative, or unaware of anti-body status, significant numbers of gay men in America appear to be experiencing confusion, dysfunction, impotency, and deep ambivalence about sexuality and intimacy between men‖ (Rofes 98). This rupture stirs a dramatic change of gay subjectivity as the discourse of safer sex29 enabling ―distinction between safe, safer, and unsafe promiscuous practice‖ (Gove 31).. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. Compared to straight writers, gay and lesbian writers talk much more about their lack of historic role models in writing about sex and about their sense of purpose,. ‧. sit. y. Nat. daring and sometimes shame, in telling outsiders things the public may not know. n. al. er. io. about their subculture, whether it‘s the community of incest survivors, gay men before. i n U. v. AIDS, or gay men who long for sex, love, and commitment here and now (Benedict. Ch. engchi. 12). Sex scenes represented in gay novels therefore serves as a literary strategy drawn on by its queer writers as opposed to the ideology of heteronormativity.30 Likewise, at. 29. The myth of safer sex, says Cindy Patton, serves as an interpellation for brining certain bodies into. position of duty an obligation that are constitutive identity through the national pedagogy, embarking on ―a frantic attempt to regain control over producing heterosexual citizenry‖ (117). Accordingly the psychosocial benefits of promiscuous past have been undermined by the pathology of safer sex. 30. John Preston, a gay writer noted for his representation of gay promiscuity in the pre-epidemic age,. holds sex scenes in gay literature stands for an empowerment of gay subjectivity, ―explicit erotic material . . . was especially important to gay men because we were all in open rebellion over the way our sexuality had been repressed. We were breaking our lives, and people were looking for a literature 38.

(46) least until the advent of the AIDS epidemic, promiscuity and the cruising of city spaces were described and recorded as a subcultural history in a great number of American gay writings as a more rewarding alternative to heterosexual models of social interactions.31 Encouraged by the liberation of the Stonewall Riot, writings of hedonism blooms, which reflecting the newly invigorated promiscuous gay sexuality.32 Violet Quill should be regarded as a literary group who draw on gay sex scenes. 治政大 of sexuality. These writers as their political apparatus against the hegemonic view 立 ‧ 國. 學. have created many literary works that spur an atmosphere of sexual experimentation, works that serve to give permission to limitless sexual activity, a hedonism that opens. ‧. sit. y. Nat. up a brand new world for gay readers. As Edmund White writes in The Farewell. n. al. er. io. Symphony set in the mid-seventies in New York city, a golden age of promiscuity in. i n U. v. the pre-epidemic of AIDS, he would never question the principle that ―as much sex as. Ch. engchi. to reflect that breakout‖ (13). 31. See Douglas Crimp in ‗How to Have Promiscuity‘ mentions, these sex promiscuity crystallized in. pre-epidemic gay writings should be viewed as ―a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality,‖ writings that serve a transgressive purpose of constitutive identity (253). 32. Such writings, as Ben Gove defines, are John Rechy‘s The Sexual Outlaw, Brad Gooch‘s The. Golden Age of Promiscuity, Allan Gurganus‘ Play Well With Others, Andrew Holleran‘s The Beauty of Men, and Edmund White‘s The Farewell Symphony, writings that reflect earlier sexual adventurers of gay sex (174). Still, literature of gay promiscuity, as Gove argues, exist not limited to this period, but can be even traced back to Allen Ginsberg‘s famous poem Howl. Vidal Gore‘s The City and Pillar (1948) represents a novel in which gay promiscuity become a theme. However, sex described in these writings, argues Gove, oftentimes ends up tragedy (25). 39.