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A. “‘Plague' is the principal metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood”
1. “Plague, from the Latin plaga (stroke, wound), has long been used metaphorically as the highest standard of collective calamity, evil, scourge…” (132).
2. “It is usually epidemics that are thought of as plagues. And these mass incidences of illness are understood as inflicted, not just endured” (133).
B. “Diseases, insofar as they acquired meaning, were collective calamities, and judgments on a community” (133).
§ “The mist feared disease, those that are not simply fatal but transform the body into something alienating, like leprosy and syphilis and cholera and (in the imagination of many) cancer, are the ones that seem particularly susceptible to promotion to ‘plague'” (133).
C. “AIDS is understood in a premodern way, as a disease incurred by people both as individuals and as members of a ‘risk group'—that neutral-sounding, bureaucratic category which also revives the archaic idea of a tainted community that illness has judged” (134).
D. “One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else” (135).
1. “Part of the centuries-old conception of Europe as a privilege cultural entity is that it is a place which is colonized by lethal diseases coming from elsewhere. Europe is assumed to be by rights free of disease” (138).
2. “[P]eople are ‘visited' by plagues” (138).
3. “The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place” (139).
4. “AIDS is thought to have started in the ‘dark continent,' then spread to Haiti, then to the United States and to Europe, then… . It is understood as a tropical disease: another infestation from the so-called Third World…” (139-40).
§ “AIDS is not just infectious but contagious” (150).
5. “Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease” (150).
E. Plague as Judgment
1. “Plagues are invariably regarded as judgments on society…This is a traditional use of sexually transmitted diseases: to be described as punishments not just of individuals but of a group (‘general licentiousness')” (142).
2. “Health itself was eventually identified…[as] evidence of virtue as disease was of depravity” (143).
F. Plague as Metaphor
1. “The plague metaphor was common in the 1930s as a synonym for social and psychic catastrophe” (145).
2. The plague metaphor “allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others' and as (potentially) everyone's disease” (152).
G. AIDS in the Political Arena
1. “The AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia…[I]t is as much a reminder of feelings associated with the menace of the Second World as it is an image of being overrun by the Third” (150).
2. “AIDS is a favorite concern of those who translate their political agenda into questions of group psychology: of national self-esteem and self-confidence” (151).
3. “A whole politics of ‘the will'—of intolerance, of paranoia, of fear of political weakness—has fastened on this disease [AIDS]” (151).
H. AIDS as Metaphor
1. AIDS is “a marker of both individual and social vulnerabilities. The virus invades the body; the disease (or, in the newer version, the fear of the disease) is described as invading the whole society” (153-4).
2. AIDS can be used as a metaphor for “contamination and mutation” (155).
I. Virus as Metaphor
1. “Notions of conspiracy translate well into metaphors of implacable, insidious, infinitely patient viruses” (156).
2. “In contrast to bacteria…viruses are described as an extremely primitive form of life” (156).
§ Viruses not only infects and contaminates, but “They [also] transport genetic ‘information,' [and] they transform cells…many of them, evolve” (156).
3. “Virus is now a synonym for change” (157).
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