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13 Contemp. Crises 1 (1989)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc13 and id is 1 raw text is: Contemporary Crises 13: 1-14 (1989) © Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands The state, public policy, and AIDS discourse BARRY D. ADAM Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4 Abstract. The paper probes the deep structure of perceptions of AIDS and the ensuing public policy trends. AIDS has become the latest symbol indexing 20th century conflicts over the family and sexuality and recapitulates some features of early debates over contraception and the control of sexually transmitted diseases. From 1981 to 1983, public talk about AIDS was virtually taboo. Since 1983, the massive proliferation of AIDS discourse has led to the development of an official story common in the press and clear in the presumptions underlying recent state policies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. These policies have favored state control of sexual speech and education, as well as control of people blamed for HIV infection, while community-based groups have sought to empower people to affirm their sexuality while avoiding viral transmission. AIDS is something of a pure case in the social construction of disease, having arrived as an unknown and unanticipated phenomenon at the site of some of the deepest anxieties of western civilization, namely sex and death. It was not long before this entirely novel entity was being encoded by highly charged rhetorics ready made by traditional debates over disease, sexual control, and homosexuality. Indeed, to make sense of the public debate over AIDS control policy in the 1980s requires a determined unpacking of the AIDS languages that have formed since 1981 and a concerted probing into the deeper political forces which have generated conflicting discourses on the issue. The socio-historical milieu AIDS arrived into a highly developed political and ideological arena which gave it meaning and a place on the historical stage. The late 1970s and 1980s, at least in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, has been a period of conflict over the (dis)establishment of the nuclear family and the rights of people to take up new domestic and sexual arrangements outside the purview of patriarchal authority (Adam 1987). This might be understood in the broad historical sweep as an element in a larger process which has been underway for several centuries where the toleration of religious and political

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