Gustavo Subero - Representations of HIV/AIDS in Contemporary Hispano-American and Caribbean Culture

REPRESENTATIONS OF HIV/AIDS IN CONTEMPORARY HISPANO-AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN CULTURE

Series editor:
C. Richard King, Washington State University, USA

Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference.

Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular culture works alongside hegemony.

The American Imperial Gothic
Popular Culture, Empire, Violence
Johan Hglund
ISBN: 978-1-4094-4954-6

Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection
Cosmetic Surgery, Weight Loss and Beauty in Popular Culture
Deborah Harris-Moore
ISBN: 978-1-4094-6944-5

Disability, Obesity and Ageing
Popular Media Identifications
Debbie Rodan, Katie Ellis and Pia Lebeck
ISBN: 978-1-4094-4051-2

Cuerpos suiSIDAs

GUSTAVO SUBERO
Regents University London, UK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Copyright 2014 Gustavo Subero

Gustavo Subero has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Subero, Gustavo.

Representations of HIV/AIDS in contemporary Hispano-American and Caribbean culture : cuerpos suiSIDAs / by Gustavo Subero.

pages cm. (The cultural politics of media and popular culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4724-2595-9 (hardback) 1. HIV infectionsUnited States. 2. HIV infectionsCaribbean Area. 3. AIDS (Disease)United States. 4. AIDS (Disease)Caribbean Area. 5. Hispanic AmericansSocial conditions. 6. Caribbean AreaSocial conditions. I. Title. II. Title: Cuerpos suiSIDAs.

RA643.83.S83 2014

362.1969792008968073dc23

2013039371

ISBN 9781472425959 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315605449 (ebk)

In 1989 Willie Colons Simn el gran varn became a huge hit with Hispanic audiences in Latin America, North American and the Caribbean. The song was written by Omar Alfanno and tells the story of Simn, a boy who is raised by an overtly machista father and expected to be his fathers mirror image. However, once he grows up and leaves the parental home to study abroad, he becomes a transvestite. One day Simn decides to pay a surprise visit to his father and turns up dressed in falda, lpiz labial y un cartern. I remember clearly when I first heard the song, how massive it became and how dreadful it made me feel about myself. As a child, I remember being teased in the school playground and called Simn by other children because I did not project an overt macho image of myself. I remember only too well the feeling of uneasiness that the song provoked in me every time I heard it (which was often as it was so famous). I remember the discussions surrounding the song, and what it signified, by the adults around me. Simn (and little did they know, myself too) was the object of derision and mockery, a warning to those who dared deviate from traditional gender behaviour and a lesson to be learnt by real men. At a time where very little scientific rationale was provided in relation to AIDS (and subsequently HIV), the only sources of information available to most of the population (especially in countries that had not been directly affected by the virus) were those that circulated in the popular imaginary through the media and other forms of popular culture. Although it is hard to document whether Colns song was intended to demonize or raise awareness about AIDS, the cultural reappropriation of the song seemed to merely serve the former. El gran varn reaffirmed the association between homosexuality, male effeminacy and AIDS. After all, all gay men are extremely effeminate, desire to become women and, as is only logical, will die of AIDS because of their unnatural sexual practices.

Regardless of the true nature of the song, it became an emblem of homophobia and, more specifically, AIDS-phobia. As Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten argue in their work on music and manipulation, music would seem to work through a peripheral route of persuasion, operating more as a reinforcer marking this space both a place of birth and death and the only space that can, somewhat, contain and/or manage the spread of AIDS. The portrayal of seropositivity provided by the song contains a number of negative stereotypes in relation to homosexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. As previously suggested, a direct relationship between same-sex desire and crossdressing is established. Yet to achieve this utopia of self-expression the individual must travel abroad as there is no space in machista societies for such deviant behaviour. This further reinforces the notion that AIDS is a foreign illness that could never have originated in these regions. The fact that the illness is never named as such also helps to distance the healthy, native us from the unhealthy, foreign them in ways that facilitate the separation of negative and positive individuals. Jonathan Vatnin clearly explains the need to use metaphors as a result of the lack of vocabulary to inscribe AIDS into discourse, in the case of El gran varn, HIV/AIDS is characterized as a strange illness, both in its enigmatic nature and its metaphoric construction as an outsider. These euphemisms allow us to avoid confronting reality by stepping around the word AIDS (2010: 8).