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Absent Bodies: The AIDS Memorial Quilt as Social Melancholia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

STEVEN JAMES GAMBARDELLA
STEVEN JAMES GAMBARDELLA
Affiliation:
History of Art Department, University College London. Email: s.gambardella@ucl.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Far from being apolitical, self-indulgent or ineffective, as was suggested by some in the activist community, the NAMES Project Quilt became a symbol of the decimation of AIDS and a beacon for those in the AIDS-affected community, and challenged and transformed public attitudes towards people with AIDS. The NAMES Project Quilt risked sanitizing and homogenizing the particularities of the deceased, but I shall argue that the spectacle of the quilt changed public opinion through its mechanisms of publicity and meaning-making. Building on Michael Warner's notion of the ‘Mass Subject’, the quilt, I will suggest, transformed the mainstream, effectively forcing the formerly abject AIDS-affected community into public consciousness through the mechanisms of mass media.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , May 2011 , pp. 213 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Senator Patrick Buchanan, from an article responding to criticisms of his speech at the Republican National Convention in August 1992. “The Cultural War for the Soul of America – by Pat Buchanan – Articles, Essays and Speeches – The Internet Brigade – Official Web Site,” www.buchanan.org/pa-92-0914.html, accessed 9 Jan. 2008.

2 Larry Kramer, quoted in Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in idem, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002), 132.

3 Crimp, 133.

4 Ibid.

5 Sigmund Freud, quoted in ibid.

6 Dean, Tim, “The Psychoanalysis of AIDS,” October, 63 (Winter 1993), 85Google Scholar.

7 See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1968).

8 Ibid., 246.

9 It is worth qualifying the term “risk groups.” The Centre for Disease Control had its own “4-H” list of social groups thought to be at risk of AIDS: Haitians, homosexuals, haemophiliacs and hypodermic drug users. Media commentators often luridly included “hookers” in this “4(or 5)-H Club.” Though HIV is of course indiscriminate, discrimination against particular subcultures and groups exacerbated the spread of HIV among them. For example, the ban on carrying drug paraphernalia can lead to the sharing of needles, and the stigma surrounding prostitution and homosexual intercourse has stifled the safer-sex message. As a result of these problems, health workers and activists have emphasized “risk behaviour” over “risk groups” to counter discrimination.

10 For more on this, see Dean.

11 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, Aids, and the Media, 3rd edn (London: Cassell, 1997), 7.

12 Douglas Crimp, “The Spectacle of Mourning,” in idem, Melancholia and Moralism.

13 Ibid., 198.

14 Ibid.

15 See Hawkins, Peter S., “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt,” Critical Inquiry, 19, 4 (Summer 1993), 757CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 A “population” is distinct from a “public” in that just as individuals are interpellated into subjects, populations are interpellated into publics. The population is the sum of people out there available to modes of address (such as the Los Angeles Times) – I would like to distinguish this term from that of the/a public which is produced through modes of address. What, after all, is a public? Perhaps we should not even consider what a public is. Because the word “public” can be a noun we are inclined to treat it as a thing and become confused about what it can be, just as we are confused about the nature of other (equally problematic) “things” like numbers and constellations of stars. Publics are properly reflexive and tautological in that they are whatever they are deemed to be in their realization.

17 As Michael Warner puts it in his introduction to Publics and Counterpublics, “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one's disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon and to speak within a certain language ideology.” Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 10. This always-already-there structure has to be contended with to speak both legibly and differently. We can only work with what we have, though what we do have has no foundation or fixity. We must utilize pre-existing forms, affects, genres in order to change them.

18 Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, accessed 3 Nov. 2008.

19 Steinbrook, Robert, “AIDS Fears Ease while Views Harden,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1989, 28Google Scholar.

20 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, new edn (London: Polity Press, 1992).

21 Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, 25–26 (1990), 56–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Ibid., 66.

23 Ibid., 57.

24 Ibid., 66–67.

25 Habermas, 160.

26 Warner, Michael, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture, 14, 1 (Winter 2002), 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 83.

29 Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Penguin, 1969), 184–85. McGinniss's book and the passage I have quoted were brought to my attention by David Joselit's Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 142.

30 I will resist the compulsion to define the NAMES Project Quilt either as text or as image since it is both, and as a gesture as such carries a poiesis that is greater than the mere combination of text and image (it is more than the sum of its parts).

31 Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” idem, Publics and Counterpublics, 159–87.

32 Ibid., 164–65.

33 Ibid., 167.

34 Ibid., 168.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 179.

37 Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” in idem, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 3.

38 See Cindy Ruskin, The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 53.

39 There is only limited performativity in the quilt: the ritual of unfolding. Unlike candle-lit vigils, the makers of the quilt as a monument are absent. As and when they do appear in news stories they are virtually always seen as being “of the public” and never as activists, even though, as I argue, their production is as much activism as traditional forms of protest.