ABSTRACT
The subject o f AIDS is produced and reproduced in a punitive discourse o f garrulous morbidity. It has been massively amplified by the powerful institutionalized voices o f racism, familialism, nationalism, and a range o f deeply-seated anxieties concerning sexual behaviour in general, and homosexual behaviour in particular. In this context, the advent o f modern cultural 'theory', w i th its emphasis on signification, sexuality, 'difference', the unconscious, power, voyeurism, narrative, and so on, seems as fortuitous in its own way as those developments in the fields o f virology and immunology which permitted the isolation and identification o f the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in 1983. Indeed, it could be said that contemporary debates in cultural studies, women's studies, psychoanalytic criticism, textual analysis, the theory o f ideology, and so on, have been preparing us for a better understanding o f what is now being done — and what is not being done — in the name o f AIDS. Yet so far, little by way o f deconstructionist analysis has entered the public arena o f AIDS commentary. No r has liberalism yet addressed itself to the question o f A IDS w i th anything like the concern which it has shown for other examples o f gross social injustice.
