The Framing of AIDS

The naming of the virus by the Human Retrovirus Subcommittee marked the initial stabilization of "HIV" as a unitary

object of medical knowledge.^[133] But even before this point, the illness AIDS had become a relatively stable cultural entity whose social meanings, however fluid and multiple, had at least begun to congeal. Over the course of a few years, AIDS had come to be "framed," or constructed, within the context of strong beliefs and attitudes about sexuality, promiscuity, and homosexuality and through recourse to a wide range of analogies: Was AIDS like cancer? Was it like herpes? Was it like hepatitis B? Was it an HTLV-like illness? AIDS itself had also come to serve as a frame for understanding other events and social behaviors. Perhaps most notably, as sociologist Steven Seidman has argued, "AIDS … provided a pretext to reinsert homosexuality within a symbolic drama of pollution and purity."^[134]

These framings, and the associated stigma, had also provided possibilities for gay men to assert claims for "ownership" of the epidemic (however ambivalently), or at least some of the public responses to it.^[135] Indeed, the same social networks and institutional linkages that had permitted rapid amplification of a virus also gave rise to the organization of a concerted grassroots response. Lesbians, subject to what Erving Goffman has called a "courtesy stigma," or stigma by association, acted as collaborators with gay men in these efforts, often playing leadership roles.^[136] This extraordinary success of gay and lesbian communities in establishing their right to speak about the epidemic would fuel a willingness and capacity to challenge the knowledge-making practices of biomedicine in the coming years.

Biomedical researchers, and in particular virologists, had also staked out claims to "ownership" of AIDS, and had done so through powerful findings concerning a probable causal agent. The credibility of AIDS research would rapidly become linked to the credibility of this particular causal claim: between 1984 and 1986, the retroviral hypothesis would achieve near-hegemonic status among scientists. It would also, by and large, be taken for granted in the communities affected by the epidemic, in the mass media, and among the lay public. The pathways, mechanisms, and consequences of the "black-boxing" of HIV are the topics of the next chapter.