[lbo-talk] AIDS, was Foucault, was Fidel

[bitch]

At 06:45 PM 12/28/2006, James Heartfield wrote:
>Joanna:
>
>>I never voted for quarantine, but I am taken aback by the reaction
>>on this list that the only motive for quarantine would be gay
>>bashing/oppression.
>
>I think where I disagree with Joanna is that I would assume that the 
>government (if I was writing only for an English list I would say 'State', 
>not 'Government', but the meaning I think is not quite right for US 
>listers) was not to be trusted as a starting point. In the abstract there 
>is nothing wrong with any public policy using compulsion for the greater 
>good - except that capitalist governments in the Western world have 
>demonstrated their default position hostility to social progress and civil 
>rights.
>
>And that would be my basic criticism of the AIDS awareness campaigns as 
>well - they assumed that the government was a force for good. I would 
>assume from the outset that it was a force for bad, and that the 
>willingness of health authorities to get behind AIDS awareness was due to 
>their willingness to give ground on the sanctity of the heterosexual 
>family if they got to associate sexual promiscuity with death in the 
>public mind. Foucault was wrong on the fact of AIDS, but he was right on 
>the puritanical meaning of AIDS awareness.

you can't really separate the two -- quarantine and the force of law 
(state). one of the guys I TAd for had been quanratined over TB as a kid. 
He hardly found the treatment humane, particularly since, like polio, these 
quarantines and public health scares always came along with a healthy dose 
of racializing bigotry that provided free cover to the hatred of the poor.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/quarantine.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/mary.html

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stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube

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