AIDS and Its Metaphors
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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AIDS and Its Metaphors is a 1989 work of critical theory by Susan Sontag. In this companion book to her Illness as Metaphor (1978), Sontag extends her arguments about the metaphors attributed to cancer to the AIDS crisis. Sontag explores how attitudes to disease are formed in society, and attempts to deconstruct them.
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Overview
Illness as Metaphor was a response to Sontag’s experiences as a cancer patient, as she noticed that the cultural myths surrounding cancer negatively impacted her as a patient. She finds that, a decade later, cancer is no longer swathed in secrecy and shame, but has been replaced by AIDS as the disease most demonized by society. She finds that the metaphors that we associate with disease contribute not only to stigmatizing the disease, but also stigmatizing those who are ill. She believes that the distractions of metaphors and myths ultimately cause more fatalities from this disease.
Discussing illness in metaphorical terms is not new, but Sontag says that AIDS is the ripest opportunity for "metaphorizing" in recent years. Also, because its earlier years in the United States were marked by an affliction of very specific risk groups – homosexual men and intravenous drug users – it has been stigmatized. The patient’s illness is perceived to be the patient's fault, because of the unsafe habits that one seemingly has to pursue to contract it – "indulgence, delinquency – addictions to chemicals that are illegal and to sex regarded as deviant." Having these defined subgroups created a distinction between the ill and potentially ill, and the general population.
AIDS is seen as a plague and as a judgment on the individuals suffering from it. Despite the fact that it is a heterosexual disease as well as a global issue, it is still often discussed as a consequence of decadence and a punishment for "deviant" sexual behavior.
Although HIV is likely not a new virus, its emergence changed attitudes towards illness and medicine. Infectious diseases have clearly not been as summarily defeated as society would have preferred to believe.
Generally, the many uncertainties about AIDS are the center of discourse on the illness, and reassurances that "the general population" is safe are multiplying. The judgments on the illness and the patients are still implicit in any discussion, and Sontag believes that detaching the guilt and shame from perspectives on this disease, and retiring the military metaphors from the discussion, will contribute to productive discourse on AIDS and help those who have contracted the illness.
Comparisons made
To explicate her claims on the various metaphors attributed to AIDS and diseases more generally, Sontag employs a number of comparisons among AIDS, cancer, and historical illnesses.
AIDS and cancer
Cancer was at one time the identity of a patient. It was a shameful and stigmatized condition, and was often omitted from obituaries and concealed from as many people as possible. Often, it was perceived to be a curse or a punishment. Sontag claims that AIDS has taken over on all counts, and that AIDS patients now suffer the same, or worse, judgment and stigmatization that cancer patients once did.
AIDS and syphilis
Like syphilis, AIDS is perceived as having stages. The tertiary stage of syphilis was the most severe, as it is with AIDS, and both have a period of latency before the progression. However, syphilis did not run its full course in every case, and even cases that ended in death could be romanticized. For example, numerous artists suffered from syphilis, and it came to be an accepted view that its effects on the brain could actually inspire original thought. No such compensating factor exists for AIDS, and it was too early in the epidemic at the time of the writing of this book to determine definitively whether AIDS always progresses to death.
Relative perceptions of diseases
Sontag examines a theory regarding relative perceptions of diseases. She believes that those diseases that society finds most terrifying are not the most widespread or the most lethal, but those that are seen to be dehumanizing. For example, a rabies phobia tore through nineteenth-century France, but rabies was actually incredibly rare, and was just terrifying with its ideas that it could transform humans into raving animals. Cholera has killed fewer people than smallpox, but the "indignity of the symptoms" made it more dreadful. Polio "withered the body" but did not touch the face, placing it above afflictions like leprosy.
Metaphors
Sontag defines metaphors as "giving the thing a name that belongs to something else", and notes that they have been used throughout history to discuss the body, illness, and health.
