In 2004, on the final day of the Bangkok AIDS Conference, a drug company packaged thousands of single antiretroviral pills into jewellery boxes and allowed one pill per delegate to be collected from their corporate booth. Many delegates at the conference came from countries where access to treatment medication was, and continues to be, restricted to the rich. There was a degree of confusion among sex worker activists who attended and whose background or migration status excluded them from accessing life-saving HIV treatment. After an entire week of protests, workshops, presentations, posters, activism, performance, installation, media and the experience of generally being marginalised within the broader HIV sector, we [sex worker activists] witnessed many migrant sex workers living with HIV and without access to treatment carrying their single pill away from the corporate booth.
(Jeffreys and Fawkes , this volume, Chap. 3)
This incident, recounted by performers and sex worker
activists Elena Jeffreys
and Janelle Fawkes
in their contribution to this volume, crystallises in a potent image the extent to which HIV treatment in the twenty-first century has been, and continues to be, divided along national, racial, gendered, class, economic, geo-political and sexual identity lines. The single pill in its little gift box offered a promise of medical reliefâprovided there were the financial and cultural resources to have access to it on a regular basis. The example shows, furthermore, how the dominant HIV and AIDS discourse is in the hand of scientists and, above all, transnational
pharmaceutical corporations. This spectacular performance of so-called benevolenceâa euphemism for a shrewd marketing strategyâby a
pharmaceutical company at the fifteenth International
AIDS Conference is an example of âthe HIV industrial
complexâ at work: that is, âthe ways in which governments, NGOs,
Big Pharma , medical researchers, and funders have formed a global bureaucratic matrix ⊠that promotes eradicating HIV and AIDS through programmatic (economic,
biomedical , technological, and pharmacological) interventionsâ (Guta et al.
2011: 15). The downside of what Adrian Guta, Stuart J. Murray and Alex McClelland theorise as a hyper-rational and scientifically framed approach is that it âprivileges particular ways of knowing and renders dissent and activism a threat to this rationalityâ (ibid.: 15). Non-rational behaviours and actionsâdiverse activist and grass-roots responses that open up counternarratives to this hegemonic HIV and AIDS discourse, including, we might point out, performanceâsit outside this pragmatic frame and risk being pushed to the margins.
1 These counternarratives, however, have been, and continue to be, vital to the discourses of HIV and AIDS, which refer not only to a viral medical condition, but are also charged with political values, social norms and moral judgments. Together, these have produced a stigma associated with HIV and AIDS like no other. To this end, art historian Douglas Crimp has asserted that âAIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to itâ (1987: 3) and gender scholar Paula Treichler has famously identified AIDS as âan epidemic of meanings or significationâ (1999: 1). Not surprisingly, then, HIV and AIDS have provoked a multitude of creative and inventive responses, not least by theatre and performance artists and activists. Performances have the power to influence the way we think about HIV and AIDS, but HIV and AIDS have, in turn, also affected how we create performance and have re-defined the role of performance in society. Addressing this cycle from the perspective of the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century is the focus of this collection.
The Remit of the Book
This volume is the first study to analyse the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective, including contributions about Australia, Canada, China, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, the UK and the USA. It marks a necessary re-affirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia , discrimination and stigmatisation . While the introduction of new antiretroviral therapies in 1996 has led to significant medical advances in financially prosperous and politically stable countries, it has contributed to the erroneous assumptions, in these privileged environments, that very little performance work about HIV and AIDS has been created since. As the opening example of the (performance of the) unequal distribution of HIV treatment so succinctly demonstrates, there is no single international story or universal experience of HIV and AIDS and, likewise, this is true of HIV and AIDS in theatre and performance. These performances and their dramaturgies play out differently in the Global North and Global South ,2 by individual country, in terms of urban and rural situations within countries, and within different demographics and communities. Rather than assuming that HIV and AIDS in performance, along with its scholarship, is a coherent entity that has been done and dusted, a key objective of the book, then, is to demonstrate that this is still a burgeoning, ever-shifting field, as the range of works collated here attest.
How, then, do we analyse HIV and AIDS in performance, when the experiences and narratives are so diverse nationally and, further, diverge again within nations or geographical areas according to their myriad intersections with gender, sexuality , race, ability and class? Within this matrix, government bodies, Non-Government Organisations, the law, health agencies, education and funding policies, the capacity (or not) for grass-roots organisation, religion, familial relationships and a myriad of other factors affect each person living with HIV in completely individual ways.3
The first issue in attempting to produce a volume that conveys the range and impact of HIV and AIDS in performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective is to acknowledge the difficulty of overcoming the Anglophone, Global North and queer contexts that both editors operate in, and that have dominated inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. This collection is edited by a cis-identifying queer woman and a cis-identifying gay man, both white and living mobile personal and academic lives that bridge countries and continents (Australia and the North of Ireland for Campbell , Sweden and Canada for Gindt ). We acknowledge the position of privilege from which our book has been conceived, and recognise that it can only be a starting point for, or a part of, what we hope will be a renewed and vibrantly international field examining contemporary performance works on HIV and AIDS. While this field is so complex, inequitable and heterogeneous it makes general statements nearly impossible, we are convinced that, despite the flaws and occlusions, the failure to at least make the attempt results in the further erasure of the experience of people living with HIV and AIDS. However, in spite of our ambitious and best intentions, we fully recognise and acknowledge some notable absences and limitations, including, but not confined to: trans experience and performance; a larger number of contributions from and about women as well as from scholars whose primary working language is not English; theatre made by people with disabilities; the experience of HIV and AIDS in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Central Asia and Eastern Europe; the impact of HIV on, and the activist resistance organised by, Latinx and Black4 populations ...
