AIDS and Disability

Week of 11/7-11/10

Just this past week we analyzed the film “Philadelphia” and the encounter of AIDS in a discriminatory, judicial battle. Tom Hanks plays the role of the protagonist, and because his business partners believe he has AIDS and is a homosexual, they try to fire him based on these beliefs. But Tom Hanks eventually wins the court case and falls victim to HIV. Back in a time where little was really known about AIDS, the reality that a virus doctors couldn’t explain was a scary one. They knew AIDS could be transferred through sexual means, but they didn’t know how it could be prevented or stopped. Even in the film, Denzel Washington’s character holds some qualms about being Tom Hanks’ counselor because he thinks the doctors will find out that AIDS can be transmitted through the skin. So what is the relation of AIDS and disability?
With AIDS, just like disabilities, one may feel shameful of having procured this illness. The shame is linked to an imputation of guilt, and sometimes even flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden from friends, family, and co-workers. This brings about isolation, harassment, and persecution because, back in the early 90s, they did not fully understand. Inside of normal sex, AIDS suggests a sexual deviance from that norm—a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity as well.
Labels such as “fag” or “queer” show up in this crisis surrounding heterosexual identity and able-bodied identity. Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; but only because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never be contained. In combining queer theory with disability studies, there is hope that the norms of sex will disappear over time, since the combination of the two could exacerbate the authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-bodied norms. Queer/disability studies can continuously invoke the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness offer us. This critical queerness and disability could, and will, collectively transform the uses to which queer/disability existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiness.