Social suffering as structural and symbolic violence : LGBT experiences in the Face of AIDS film archive

The cultural and sociological analysis of AIDS gives researchers the chance to consider the alarming concentration of HIV among vulnerable populations. Even if explicit discrimination has decreased at least in some Western countries, both in developed states – within their ethnic and racial minority groups and marginal populations (i.e., sex workers) – and in developing countries there are individuals living with HIV who experience structural and symbolic violence due to poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, gender inequality, social exclusion, stigmatization, or religious and sexual oppression (Farmer 2001; Parker 2002; Bourdieu 1990; 2001). This is especially true if we consider that the HIV/AIDS epidemic requires us to consider LGBT issues – especially connected to health – as transnational phenomena that are interconnected with local practices and meanings. As stated by Ann Cvetkovich in An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, queer archives “address particular versions of the determination to ‘never forget’ that gives archives of traumatic history their urgency” (Cvetkovich 2003: 242). Even if any documentary or visual product, as any other cultural object, is not a neutral product and further research is needed to interpret Hildebrand’s gaze, the Face of AIDS film archive consists of assemblages of desires, experiences, narratives, and accounts, depictions of political conditions and individual resistance that challenge the coherence of a (single) narrative. Following Cvetkovich, Hildebrand’s project is not aimed to search for “what really happened” or “what is really happening,” neither is it “linearly structured around canonical events” (Edenheim 2013) but provides the chance to pay attention to ephemeral events and fragments that both give the archive a sense of urgency and deeply challenge the normative order (related to standardized form of expression, to plot construction and definition, to the expected audience, and to the values at stake). While HIV- or AIDS-affected individuals are telling their stories they are at the same time offering potential listeners the chance to recognize what has been said. They are proffering a political statement and claiming social and sexual justice. As Boltanski stated, societies can offer two main kinds of reactions to suffering: the politics of pity and the politics of justice (Boltanski 1999). Interviews by Hildebrand do not focus merely on the pietistic aspects of their health status but ask the listener to consider the iniquities and structural disadvantages we are all forced to face. In particular, the gay population, the main subject of this chapter, offers their own biographies to the listeners: in this case, we all risk imprudently to “blame the victim” – as many of the same individuals with HIV from vulnerable groups because of their social class, ethnicity/race, or gender identity usually do blame themselves. The action of blaming someone (or himself/herself ) contributes to the eradication of an event from its political or economic context and the construction of victim hierarchies where someone is more of a victim than somebody else. Within this stratification of bodies, people living with HIV or AIDS usually blame just themselves. Stories of HIV, especially in developing countries, are often narratives of poverty, social exclusion, discrimination, corruption, insecurity, emergency, or broken families because of the exploitation of labor force, housing problems, stigmatization, religious persecution, ghetto or favela segregation, unavailability of antiretroviral drugs, and governmental unwillingness to provide treatments or implement health policies. Every story has a deep political meaning since it witnesses the misrecognition faced by bodies of nonnormative sexualities and poz bodies, targets of everyday and routinized violence (Scheper-Hughes 1992) and of political and structural violence (Farmer 2001; 2004). Those are bodies who remember (Fassin 2007). Much of Staffan Hildebrand’s archive related to the gay male population, specifically in developing countries, highlights the vulnerability of gay people living with HIV/AIDS or exposed to a high risk of virus transmission because of the structural, interpersonal, and symbolic violence they face. These reflections will be clearer if we take into account the words of Gracia Violeta Ross Quiroga, HIV ambassador for Tearfund and campaigner for the rights of people living with HIV, who was interviewed in 2008 in Bolivia, when she was asked “Who are the people today that are getting infected from HIV?”: The people who are getting infected in Bolivia with HIV are still a lot of the most vulnerable groups: men who have sex with men, young people, people living in the margins of the Bolivian society, and women. For a while we did not see so many cases of women and now this is going up very fast … and right now we see people from the indigenous groups also joining the groups and we are aware of some people who died of AIDS in the rural area [concerned].… In Bolivia, in societies like for example El Alto, the city of El Alto, which is a city made of internal migration, the poorest rural area in Bolivia expulses people to the big cities so they came here.… You know coming from a rural area with a conservative culture to a big city in which sex is available sometimes for free for some of them is actually making them vulnerable, also these cities that are populated with a lot of people create the situation of vulnerability for people you know, you have more workers offering their services and less opportunities for all of them.… These people are highly vulnerable to HIV because they do not have information they face a new way of living and they also live in poor conditions and they do not have health insurance and for them living in big cities is very expensive.… We know migrant women face violence, women from indigenous groups are raped in the cities and not in their rural villages, and we are not addressing this properly in Bolivia.… I cannot tell a woman in El Alto … use a condom and be safe, she cannot say this to her husband, if she says these words she will be beaten and she will face domestic violence and maybe will be killed. So, for these kinds of women I need other kind of messages. (Archive ID: 2008_14_01) Social suffering, personal experience of pain and suffering, as Ross Quiroga states, is usually imposed socially and structurally across race, class, gender, sexuality, and other power-ridden categories. Abusive relations, such as those implied in the stigmatization of people living with HIV, can be better understood as structured phenomena that encompass both structural and personal levels of analysis. Marginality and stigmatization related to HIV status are deeply connected, for example, to the lifestyle of the people involved, their social class and status, their housing condition, their presence or expulsion from the labor market, their eventual contacts with drug underworlds or the bureaucracies of social services and social control, their migrant or refugee status, their gender and gender role’s codes. To this end, since this volume is the product of contributors from different cultural backgrounds we do not intend to take for granted the still existing stereotyped relation between homosexuality and AIDS. Instead, we will attempt to summarize the main sociological approaches that acknowledge the link that exists between AIDS and the stigmatization of nonnormative sexual conducts and then we will address the issue of structural violence and how it can be discerned in the impact of HIV/AIDS on oppressed and marginalized groups on a global scale, as manifested in the Face of AIDS film archive.