Screening Discourses: HIV/AIDS and Visual Representation

In this paper I will analyze the crisis of representation embedded within the visuality of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980’s-1990’s through a reflection on Derek Jarman’s film Blue. While Blue is most often noted for its poetic and philosophical narrative, alongside its spatializing soundscape, I want to engage the film’s visual demands in presenting us with what has been called “a film without image.” In creating Blue, Jarman’s intentions were to address the inability of film to accurately represent AIDS as lived and embodied. In this regard, I argue that Blue is an “anti-film,” one that functions similarly to an anti-body or anti-virals in its diagnosis and treatment of the body within and alongside AIDS. I meditate on the prefixal anti-, a term that connotes not simply a spatial or proximal relation, but a social and political form of opposition.

Alongside this I want to interrogate the visual technologies embedded within the ELISSA test, a test that detects seroconversion by way of the presence of anti-bodies, and the ways in which the visual confirmation of seroconversion through the presence of the body’s immunological response to HIV (the production of antibodies), is productive of a particular form of viral subjectivity. Stated differently, the visual marker that indicates one’s seroconversion operates as a form of subjection and a form of subjectification, one that, quoting Catherine Waldby, “not only compels subjects in certain ways but which also induces the internalization of new norms of identity and self management.”