Description:
One of the most effective forms of resistance to AIDS, oddly enough, has been the academic essay anthology, beginning with Douglas Crimp's AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1988), the prototype of discursive intervention. Paula Treichler's How to Have Theory in an Epidemic derives its title from the epilogue Crimp wrote for his collection: "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," which took its cue from a song by Michael Callen. Aside from physical and mental crisis, AIDS has produced what Treichler calls "an epidemic of signification." In the early years of the syndrome, that is, more words than drugs were flung, usually to contain certain people's supposedly pathological behavior than to fight the virus--but also to recapture metaphor and to press cultural studies in the service of resistance. How to Have Theory in a sense revisits and chronicles that period. Treichler, a professor at the University of Illinois, revised material that originally appeared years earlier in journals and anthologies, in the meantime enlarging the scholarly apparatus (fully a third of the book comprises the notes, bibliography, and index, indispensable to the researcher) and providing more illustrations. The result is one of the most important books on AIDS. Treichler examines medical language, gender issues, television and magazines, and journalistic accounts of AIDS in the Third World. She skillfully analyzes the ways that medicine and the media have constructed certain kinds of diseased bodies upon which to project coercive fantasies of sex, drug use, and ethnicity. As Treichler notes, "The AIDS epidemic ... reminds us that the practices that we call science have evolved in part as a series of safeguards against the seductive power of culture, society, language, and individual consciousness to perceive and define reality in ways that are scientifically or aesthetically appealing, politically or personally palatable." Thus, even as she indicts science for its practical and semantic failures, she demonstrates that within science itself we shall overcome. --Robert Burns Neveldine
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