China’s ‘Patient Zero
History, Action and AIDS Prevention
A paper presented at the 12th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Tokyo,
August 1-6. 1999
Rodney H. Jones
City University of Hong Kong
enrodney@cityu.edu.hk
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship among knowledge, history and action in relation to AIDS prevention in China. The construction of ‘histories’ in public discourse and their subsequent appropriation by individuals in situated social life are seen as instances of mediated action in which institutions and individuals invoke various ‘voices’ from the dominant Discourses of the culture and deploy them to meet the needs of particular moments. The tension between these voices and the unique ways they are adapted and mixed in particular situations works to either limit or expand both a nation’s ability to control the spread of HIV within its borders and the individual’s ability to protect him or herself against infection.
Three examples of the appropriation of official histories of the spread of AIDS in China are examined and compared: a question form from an ‘AIDS knowledge contest’ sponsored by the Beijing Evening News and several official government bodies, a dramatic rendering of China’s first AIDS case which appears in the popular book AIDS Closes in on China (Fang 1995), and a conversation about AIDS prevention with a gay hotel worker in Fuzhou. In these examples, historical narratives are used as tools of identity with which writers and speakers establish their relationship to HIV and assess personal or collective risk by drawing various discursive boundaries. ‘AIDS knowledge’ in all of these instances is portrayed not so much ‘biomedical knowledge’ but as ‘historical’ or ‘narrative’ knowledge, knowledge of the nation’s ‘stories’ surrounding AIDS, which are appropriated strategically in carrying out actions as diverse as the government justifying a particular policy and an individual explaining to a doctor why s/he wants to take an HIV antibody test.
Keywords: AIDS, discourse analysis, history, sociocultural studies
Introduction
To commemorate World AIDS Day in 1998, the Beijing Evening News (Beijing Wanbao) along with the Beijing Department of Hygiene, the Beijing Association of STD/AIDS Prevention, the Beijing Department of Disease Control and the Beijing Institute for STD Prevention , sponsored the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ (women shenbian de aizibing zhishi jingsai), consisting of a series of twenty-two questions through which contestants could demonstrate their ‘knowledge’ of AIDS (Text 1). Of the twenty two questions, however, only two explicitly involve the transmission of HIV, and only two involve ways in which infection can be prevented, topics which for most people would count as central to ‘AIDS knowledge’. The remaining eighteen questions deal with the historical spread of AIDS in China as a whole and in Beijing in particular: three questions touching on the number of reported and estimated cases of HIV infection, eleven involving the existence of infection among certain social groups, with particular attention to ‘famous firsts’, (the first case of AIDS in China, the first cases among STD patients and IV drug users, the first Beijing resident to be infected), and four asking about the policies and programs of various government bodies and (government sponsored) non-governmental organizations. Even the questions regarding transmission and prevention mostly present these issues in the context of the nation, the city of Beijing or particular social groups (which routes of transmission have been detected in Beijing, for example, and what the nation’s policy for AIDS prevention should be) rather than in the context of individual behavior. The ‘AIDS in Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ is essentially a ‘history test’, constructing ‘AIDS knowledge’ not as a body of ‘scientific facts’, but as a body of historical narratives, the nation’s cumulative experience of the epidemic, through which citizens are led to understand HIV transmission in the context of its relationship to various cultural, national and regional identities.
Historians and sociologists examining the phenomenon of AIDS (Berridge and Strong eds. 1993, Brandt 1987, 1988, Fee and Fox eds. 1988, 1992) have long pointed out the importance of official histories and the ‘lessons’ they are called upon to support in the construction of the ‘social meaning’ of AIDS and the formulation of public policy around it. Communication scholars and psychologists, meanwhile, have explored the effect of the appropriation of popular narratives about AIDS from public discourse on people’s assessment of individual risk and treatment of those either infected or vulnerable to infection (Kitizinger 1993, Pittman and Gallois 1996). This paper attempts to understand the relationship among knowledge, history and AIDS prevention in China both on the level of ‘social meaning’ and on the level of individual risk behavior by focusing on the actions which are made possible when people construct narrative histories of the disease and when they strategically deploy these histories in specific social circumstances.
There has been much work in the fields of Critical Linguistics (Kress 1985, Kress and Hodge 1979) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1995, van Dijk 1993) over the last ten years examining the way those in power promote their ideologies through discourse. In these approaches, texts are seen as sites for the reproduction (or contestation) of the dominant ‘orders of discourse’ (Foucault 1984) operating within societies. These collections of various conventionalized textual tools and systems of human relationship, which I will be referring to simply as Discourses (Gee 1996), maintain and enforce the power of dominant groups and institutions in texts by, for example, creating particular subject positions for readers or constructing particular ideologies or worldviews as ‘taken for granted’. With only a few exceptions (like Wodak 1993), however, there has been relatively less attention to how these orders of discourse actually exert ideological force on the level of at which these texts are used by individuals and groups. While we know quite a lot about how ‘power’ manifests itself in texts, we still know very little about how power and ideology work when human beings appropriate these texts to take action in everyday life.
The approach I will be adopting attempts to enrich our understanding of the relationship between discourse and ideology by taking as its object of analysis not texts per se, but the actions that texts make possible. It draws upon recent work in the fields of psychology (Penuel and Wertsch 1995, Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Wertsch 1991, 1994, 1997) and sociolinguistics (Scollon 1998a) which seeks to bridge the gap between the study of culture, on the one hand, and the study of individual cognition, on the other, by conceptualizing human behavior as mediated action people take by selectively appropriating various cultural tools made available to them in the communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) in which they participate. Building upon the work of Soviet theorists Lev Vygotsky (1981) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1996), sociocultural practice theory begins with the assumption that all social behavior, including ‘inner speech’, is necessarily mediated through the symbolic resources of one’s culture. The nature of this mediated action, however, is not determined solely by the ‘cultural tools’ that are available, but also, and crucially, by the ways individuals appropriate, mix and adapt these tools to specific circumstances and specific needs. What determines how we act in regard to HIV or anything else is neither decided by the texts available to us about it nor by our ‘selves’, but by the ‘tension between the mediational means as provided in the sociocultural setting and the unique contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions’ (Wertsch 1994:205).
Chief among these mediational means for sociocultural practice theorists is what Wertsch calls ‘voices’, which we invoke through the words, structures, expressions, genres, registers, texts and codes of interaction that we choose from the linguistic resources of a community. When we borrow these linguistic resources from our culture, we, of course, are borrowing much more than language. We are also appropriating the ideologies, the worldviews, the social relationships and systems of power associated with these tools; we are giving voice to Discourses. The effects these Discourses have on individuals, however, can only be assessed through observing how people and groups use and adapt them to the fit the needs of particular social situations.
In this paper I will use this perspective to examine the ways ‘AIDS histories’ are used by different kinds of writers or speakers in different contexts, specifically by government officials and journalists in formulating the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge’ questionnaire, by a popular author in a book called AIDS Closes in on China, and by a gay hotel worker in the southeastern city of Fuzhou in conversing with me about the HIV situation in his city and the social and sexual practices associated with it. My goal is not just to determine the ideologies and power relations which are given voice to, but to examine the ways in which these voices work to either limit or expand participation in certain kinds of actions depending on how they are appropriated, adapted and mixed with other voices.
Official’ and ‘Unofficial’ Histories
Much of the work in sociocultural practice studies has been concerned with the ways individuals appropriate ‘official histories’ in constructing their accounts of the significant events in their nation’s narrative (Jones et al. 1997, Penuel and Wertsch 1998, Scollon 1998b, Tulviste 1994, Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Wertsch and Rozin 1998). In most of these studies, particularly those carried out in former Soviet states, analysts have noted clear differences between ‘official histories’, those which appear in such places as school textbooks and support the ideology of the ‘ruling class’, and ‘unofficial histories’, histories learned at home and through word of mouth within what Rubie Watson (1993) calls ‘communities of memory’, histories which often exist in opposition to the ‘official’ history. Scollon and his colleagues (Jones et al. 1997, Scollon 1998b), in their study of transitional Hong Kong, noted multiple dominant Discourses at work in creating ‘official histories’ including political, journalistic and commercial Discourses, and thus multiple sources on which individuals draw in the construction of ‘unofficial histories’. In most of these studies however, while much is made of the ways individuals mix ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ voices, there is a tendency to draw rather clear lines of distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ accounts and to portray them as almost inevitably in opposition to each other.
This may be in part a function of the kinds of contexts which have been studied, societies undergoing significant social transformation involving clear and dramatic breaks with old regimes. In post Deng China, in which the past has been simultaneously and selectively repudiated and embraced in what Zha (1995:10) calls the ‘half-baked, sheepish, defensive, cynical, masked, stealthy, and often comic atmosphere in which reform zigzags ahead.’, drawing clear distinctions as to what counts as an official history and an unofficial one, is often difficult. The recent explosion in publication and electronic media and the proliferation of new avenues for public discourse, according to Evans (1997:16) ‘makes the issue of the relationship between dominant discourse and its subjects more complex...Texts published under official auspices often suggest themes and perspectives that subvert the notion of an identifiable official discourse. As a result, there is no easy way of defining what actually constitutes the official discourse.’
Other scholars studying post Deng China have also sought to problematize overly facile distinctions between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ discourses which privilege unofficial discourses as ‘the truth’ and dismiss official discourses as ‘propaganda’. ‘It is perhaps the natural response of an outsider, in discovering dissidence under the rug in an authoritarian society,’ writes Link (1992:7) ‘to assume that the unofficial mode represents what people ‘really’ think and that the formulaic official language is merely a cover...But the relations between official and unofficial language uses are more complicated than that. Both kinds of language are fully ‘real’ and are equally essential to getting along in Chinese life.’ Similarly, Anagnost (1994), in her ethnographic studies of ‘Speak Bitterness’ stories among Chinese peasants, observes fragments of ‘official speech’ which ‘seem to surface so naturally in the chatter of everyday life’ that it leads her to ask: ‘Can this unexpected presence of ‘official language’ signify only the extent to which the power of the state has become internalized within the speaking subject? Can we not conceive of power as a more dialectical process that returns some agency to the ‘masses’ in shaping the meaningfulness of language?’ (258-9).
In my own work on the discourse of HIV in China ( Jones 1997, 1998a, c) I have found, rather than a clear distinction between the language of the Party and the language of the ‘people’, a number of emergent public Discourses around AIDS, among which are a Discourse of traditional (previously regarded as ‘feudalistic’) values, a new Discourse of gay rights (quite distinct from Western discourses of gay liberation), a Discourse of individualism and sexual liberation, and new Discourses of government control very different from the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric of the past, all developing in dialogue with one another, and freely borrowing tools from one another and from other Discourses as it suits the needs of the moment. Revolutionary slogans, for example, are a much more common feature of the new Discourse of gay rights than of official government health promotion materials.
I would like to suggest that these difficulties in operationalizing the notions of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ histories is not a unique aspect of China, but occur in almost any cultural setting, and derive more from limitations in our current ways of looking at discourse and Discourses rather than the, albeit special, nature of the current ‘discursive revolution’ taking place in the People’s Republic. Many of these limitations result from where we are looking when we are looking for ideology in discourse. Does ideology exist in texts, in the people who make them, in the people who use them, or, as I will argue, in their use?
Whether on not a text or some kind of textual tool has a particular ideological effect depends not just on the Discourses it gives voice to but also on the mediational chains it has traveled through to its current moment of appropriation and the ‘history’ it has accumulated along the way, including the different kinds of actions it has been employed to perform. When a person appropriates, for example, ‘official’ statistics regarding HIV infection into an interaction involving the negotiation of sexual risk, it is usually not the case that these statistics have been appropriated directly from official sources. It is more likely that they were appropriated from some ‘unofficial’ source, a friend, for example, who heard them from his doctor, who read them in the newspaper which gleaned them from official government reports. Even the government reports doubtless appropriated these statistics from sources like epidemiological studies. Every time these statistics have been appropriated to take some kind of action, the meaning of them has changed, as they have been mixed with the official voices of the government, the journalistic voices of the newspaper, the biomedical voices of the doctor and the ‘personal’ voices of the friend. From their source in scientific texts to their actual deployment in everyday life, these particular ingredients of ‘official history’ may have been altered to the extent that even the numbers are totally different. In cases like this, it becomes much more difficult to say with any certainty what is ‘official’ about them.
Just as the notion of ‘official’ Discourses is problematic, so is that of ‘unofficial’ Discourses, and the idea that they are inevitably constructed in ‘opposition’ to ‘official’ voices. That they are constructed in dialogue with these Discourses is clear, but I would like to suggest that this dialogue is much more complicated than simple hegemonic struggle in which producers and consumers in texts are seen either as reconstructing or ‘taking as given’ dominant orders or discourse, or contesting them (Fairclough 1992), but instead involves multiple purposes and multiple relationships among various communities of practice. Few people appropriate official voices in order to either reproduce them or contest them; they appropriate them to perform any number of other social actions, and the degree to which reproduction or contestation of dominant Discourses is achieved depends entirely on the tension between the Discourses and the purposes to which they are put. Under these circumstances, it is possible (and even common) for official voices to be appropriated in ways that simultaneously take them as given and contest them, simultaneously reproduce them and change them.
Rather than drawing a clear line of demarcation between official and unofficial histories, between hegemonic and non-hegemonic Discourse, we should see hegemony in terms of a complex and often unpredictable web of mediational chains which connect public discourse and situated social interaction. Discourses are not static and monolithic machines of power, but dynamic, always emergent expressions of the struggle for power among multiple social groups and communities of practice that takes place along these mediational chains. Therefore, rather than comparing ‘official’ histories with ‘unofficial’ histories, as previous studies of this type have done, I would like rather to trace the national narratives of AIDS in China as they move through various mediational chains from ‘official’ government publications to ‘unofficial’ uses in everyday life. To the extent that I will be using the terms ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, I will be referring much less to texts and Discourses than to the uses to which these texts and Discourses are put.
AIDS Histories: Official Uses
All actions around AIDS, whether on the level of a government department implementing a particular policy or set of regulations, or on the level of an individual’s sexual practices, are at least indirectly mediated through histories about the virus. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the virus apart from its histories, the stories that surround it which we see on television, read about in the newspaper or hear from friends or ‘experts’.
Histories of AIDS can be regarded on one hand as cultural tools in their own right which are appropriated into particular activities in order to perform particular actions alongside the myriad other cultural tools involved in the activity, the ‘AIDS is Right Beside us AIDS Knowledge Contest’, for example, appropriating along with its litany of historical ‘facts’ the format of a multiple choice test. The degree to which histories limit or expand participation in particular actions depends a great deal on the dialogue between the history and the other cultural tools with which it is appropriated. The multiple choice test, for instance, helps to construct history as, rather than a narrative to be told, a series of facts which one should know, whereas in the popular book AIDS Closes in on China the presentation of many of these very same facts, but as a series of dramatic narratives, constructs history in a very different way, as something to be ‘experienced’ rather than ‘known’.
On the other hand, histories can themselves be seen as configurations of various cultural tools borrowed from a vast pool of cultural resources, tools such as maps, dates, statistics, metaphors, social stereotypes, political slogans, popular sayings, different configurations of process type and participants, different realizations of modality and modulation, and different registers. These configurations of cultural tools invoke the voices of various Discourses. Histories used in different ways involve the appropriation of different kinds and configurations of cultural tools, but they might, at the same time give voice to some of the very same Discourses.
The ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ provides a good example of the heteroglosic nature of AIDS histories. On one hand, with its concern for both ‘the nation’ and Beijing as the context of HIV infection and its heavy reliance on ‘facts and figures’, this text resembles closely the type of history one might find in official government reports. On the other hand, it also gives voice to Discourses of popular culture in framing itself as a contest—the reward for knowledge, in this case, being a cash prize rather than avoidance of infection—from Journalistic Discourse in its focus on ‘famous firsts’, from educational Discourse by appropriating the format of a multiple choice test, and from the Discourse of public health, in presenting itself as a tool for AIDS education. The official voices of The Beijing Departments of Hygiene and Disease Control are in continual dialogue with the journalistic voices of reporters and writers at the Beijing Evening News, and the professional voices of AIDS experts and educators at the Beijing Institute for STD Prevention.
In order to understand how these voices mix to create a particular ideology
it is necessary to ask what actions are being taken when people appropriate them. From the point of view of governments, the primary action made possible through the appropriation of histories is the creation of the ‘nation’, what Anderson (1983) calls the ‘imagined community’ as a entity in space, in time and in relation to the individuals and groups which make it up. It is this action of drawing the boundaries of the nation that lies beneath all other actions undertaken through official appropriations of histories. Whether they are used to inspire preventative measures by portraying the gravity of the threat of HIV or to justify some AIDS related government policy, all official uses of AIDS histories have as their prerequisite the creation of the nation, a creation to which each of the various voices invoked, the voices of science and public health, the voice of education, the voice of journalism, the voices of the Party and of ‘tradition’ lend their contribution. At the same time, AIDS and the narratives surrounding it contribute to a larger Discourses of nationalism, in much the same way Billing (1995) observes weather reports and other artifacts and activities not overtly nationalistic nevertheless reinforce the idea of nationhood.
In the construction of a national and social identity around AIDS, histories draw boundaries along a number of different dimensions. These include a physical dimension, geographical boundaries drawn around countries, regions, cities, and even districts or neighborhoods within cities, a temporal dimension, the ways the epidemic is bounded in time and situated in relation to already existing national narratives, and a social dimension, boundaries which delineate real or imagined communities of practice and construct some as ‘risk groups’ and others as part of the ‘general public’.
The ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ displays a configuration of cultural tools typical of most official uses of history in China, including a heavy dependence on dates, statistics, political slogans and what in Chinese are referred to as tifa (or ‘ways of saying’) (footnote), as well as an emphasis on the state as the primary agent in history. At the same time, however, while employing a similar configuration of cultural tools as earlier public health histories, the boundaries that are drawn are very different, reflecting both the uniqueness of HIV and the degree to which social circumstances and the political discourse mobilized to police them have changed in China since the days of the ‘Patriotic Public Health Campaigns’ (aiguo weisheng yundong). One of the most difficult things about constructing a history around AIDS from the point of view of the state is that the spread of HIV in China in many ways negates the assertions of previous public health histories, histories that glorified the Party’s apparent success in eradicating venereal disease (Ma 1993, Horn 1969, Sidel and Sidel 1982). Any official history of AIDS in China inevitably speaks dialogically to these older histories, seeking to reconcile past success and present danger.
The primary temporal boundary in older public health histories is between ‘Old China’, in which feudalism and foreign aggression fueled devastating epidemics, and the ‘New China’, in which, due to the measures of the Party and the state to outlaw and eliminate the foreign evils of drugs and prostitution, dreaded diseases no longer threaten the masses. In newer AIDS histories, the primary temporal boundary is not the ‘utopian’ distinction between ‘Old China’ and "New China’, but a ‘golden age’ distinction (Scollon and Scollon 1995) between the ‘China without AIDS’ of the past and the ‘China with AIDS’ of the present and foreseeable future. The shift in temporal perspectives involves a certain risk for the state. The way this shifting of perspectives is made palatable is through the appropriation of different cultural tools with which to draw temporal boundaries. Whereas in older histories, the advance and decline of epidemics is seen in the context of political events (particularly the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949) and administrative measures (legislation, mass campaigns), reflecting what Gu (1996) sees as a tendency of the discourse of revolution to attempt to match the world to discourse, more reformist histories of AIDS often scrupulously avoid associating the spread of HIV with political events or public policy, for to do so would risk implicating the reform measures themselves in the spread of AIDS or in the social changes driving that spread. Instead, temporal boundaries are drawn with epidemiological milestones, years in which the virus ‘entered’ particular geographical regions and social groups. In the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ this is exemplified by questions about what are known of as the ‘Three Firsts’ (disan diyi) ( ‘The AIDS is Right Beside Us Knowledge Contest Receives…’ 1998): the first case of HIV infection within China’s borders, the first Chinese STD patient to be found to be HIV infected, and first case of infection involving a worker returning from abroad, milestones which place the origins of HIV infection outside the borders of the country and outside the borders of the normal healthy body. Geographical and clinical causes of AIDS are highlighted rather than political causes, and although some political dates are asked in the contest form, both local (how many times the Beijing Municipal Committee for Hygiene and Disease Prevention has held conferences) and international (World AIDS Day), these are not presented as milestones, but rather as part of an ongoing national struggle constructed as part of a greater global struggle.
Temporal boundaries in contemporary AIDS histories are closely associated with geographical boundaries. AIDS penetrates the borders of the country and ‘step by step’ advances into Beijing through various social groups. The way geographic boundaries function in these texts also distinguishes them from earlier public health histories. In older histories of sexually transmitted diseases in China, the primary geographical boundaries drawn were the boundary of the nation and that between the countryside and the cities. In these narratives, like Ma Weigang’s (1993) Prohibiting Prostitution, Prohibiting Drugs (Jinchang Jindu), STDs are portrayed as originating beyond China’s borders and entering the country via its port cities through the practice of prostitution. Cities are the epicenters of infection and moral degradation which threaten to spread disease into the countryside, and the battle against STDs is one waged on the cities by the forces of ideological purity represented by the peasants. Contemporary AIDS histories like the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ similarly make use of the boundary of the nation to portray HIV as invading from outside, seen for example in question 7 which asks the nationality of the country’s first AIDS patient (Here nationality is reduced to only two categories, Chinese or foreigner, insider or outsider.) The contest also employs the boundary between the city and the countryside, reflected in questions 5, 8, 9, 12 and 13, which focus on the boundary of the municipality of Beijing itself. Where older revolutionary discourses, however, portrayed the cities as the sources of disease and other social evils, and the countryside as healthy and ideologically pure, newer discourses of AIDS prevention portray AIDS as invading the cities in the form of visitors, non-residents, and migrant workers from backward rural areas where the virus has taken hold among uneducated, IV drug using peasants.
Just as geographical boundaries are linked to temporal boundaries in official uses of histories, so are they linked to social boundaries and the construction of a host of new social identities that the epidemic has given rise to, many of which are specifically predicated on the basis of geographic origin and movement. In the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’, for example, prominent identities are foreigners, Chinese, residents of Beijing and non-residents, and migrant workers. Other identities are predicated upon practices which violate the boundaries of law (prostitutes), social norms (homosexuals), or physical normality (STD patients). Finally, there are identities based on occupation, many of which also involve some kind of contact with the ‘boundaries’ of contemporary Chinese society (hotel workers, private entrepreneurs).
Again, the social boundaries here are quite different from those in older revolutionary Discourse which divided people on the basis of class origin, ‘work unit’ (dan wei) or ideological belief, as well as from what might be called Confucian Discourses which assign identity based primarily on one’s role in the family. Many of the identities in AIDS prevention discourse, in fact, simply did not exist as recognized social selves twenty years ago in China. When officials in the 70’s proclaimed, for example, that there were no homosexuals in China, they weren’t completely wrong, since nearly all of the men who had sex with men or women who had sex with women then, and many still today, got married, had children and regarded their same sex sexual activity as an activity rather than an identity (Zhou H.S. 1997). The identity of the prostitute as well, was completely absent from official discourses during the Maoist years (since prostitutes ‘no longer existed’), and even now in much of the official discourse on AIDS, you are more likely to see prostitution referred to as a phenomenon, ‘prostitution and whoremongering’ (maiyin piaochang), rather than as an identity.
One of the main ways the creation of these new identities is achieved linguistically is through the addition of the suffix -zhe, which is not unlike adding an –er to the end of a verb like write or bake. Zhe can be added to activities and also to attributes. Most conventional social identities in Chinese, however, do not involve activities or attributes, but rather social roles, (within the family or work unit), and so are not marked with this suffix. A search for the suffix -zhe in my corpus of official government documents and health promotion pamphlets (as well as for -renyuan, which also converts an activity into an identity) (see Appendix 1) yielded a similar cast of characters as found in the contest form, identities based on the act of crossing boundaries, whether they be physical, physiological or social. Some identities are predicated on movement across geographical boundaries (mobile people, people returning from visiting relatives, people from other provinces and cities). Others are predicated on physical, psychological or social attributes (AIDS patients, and HIV carriers, AIDS sufferers, victims and survivors, unlucky people, and people who have difficulty marrying). These are people who have crossed the boundary of the normal, whether it be the normal healthy body or normal social relationships. Yet another group of identities is predicated on social practices (homosexuals, blood sellers, IV drug addicts, prostitutes and promiscuous people), people whom the government would call liumang (hooligans). The term liumang is historically associated with not just the crossing of social boundaries, but geographical ones as well, liu meaning to ‘flow’ or to ‘drop’ and mang which currently means ‘common people’, but in traditional times meant ‘to leave or be forced to leave one’s land’ (Dutton 1998:62). In the presentation of ‘risk groups’ in many AIDS histories, this merging of social and geographical transgression is manifested in such characters as women from the countryside flooding into the cities to become prostitutes and drug addicted peasants selling their HIV infected blood in hospitals in the cities.
Virtually all of these identities, which I refer to collectively as liumin (moving people) are constructed as not just at risk for HIV infection (if not already infected), but more importantly, as at risk for spreading HIV, as a consequence of their movement. Just a few of the identities yielded in the search could be construed as not at risk, identities, usually involving professions such as scientists or government officials, or constructed by negating ‘at risk’ identities (people who do not have a history of anal intercourse, people who are not homosexual). This class of people, which I will call renmin, ‘the people’ or the ‘general public’, are considered ‘normal’ primarily because they do not take on identities based on activities and attributes—they do not need to since they have not violated the borders of traditional social roles.
While all of these choices of tools and the boundaries that are drawn with them are in part determined by the ‘realities’ of the epidemic—HIV in China was indeed fist detected in the rural southwest, the migrant population is indeed a major factor in the spread of HIV, as is the increase in previously proscribed sexual practices—they also represent a strategic attempt by users to construct a new discourse of social control in a situation where the older ‘revolutionary Discourse’ no longer proves adequate. From this pattern of constructing HIV vulnerability as a function of unregulated movement across the various boundaries which contain the ‘nation’ and the ‘people’, a pattern evident not just in the ‘AIDS Knowledge Contest’, but over a range of histories from official sources, we can postulate the operation in official AIDS discourse of what might be called a ‘Discourse of Social Stability’, similar to the phenomenon observed by Dutton (1998) in his analysis of the discursive regulation of the new and growing urban population in China, and perhaps best expressed in the slogan touted shortly after the June Fourth incident: ‘stability overrides everything’ (wending yadao yiqie) (Li 1995:465). This Discourse is very different from the ‘Discourse of revolution’ observed by Gu (1996), which not only encouraged but glorified movement across boundaries (overturning traditional hierarchies, sending city residents out into the countryside to learn from the peasants, etc.). At the same time, it shares many features with more traditional Discourses in which cosmic order is predicated on social order, particularly order within the family, and chaos (luan) is seen as a result of violating social and familial roles and responsibilities .
The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest, therefore, operates ideologically by constructing ‘AIDS knowledge’ as the mastery of a particular Discourse, in this case a Discourse which portrays risk not in terms of specific practices, but in terms of social identities predicated on the crossing of geographical and behavioral borders. On one hand, AIDS histories use this Discourse to present a certain view of AIDS prevention. On the other hand, AIDS histories are used by this Discourse to present a certain view of the world. The subject position created by the multiple-choice text reinforce both the ‘truth’ of this history (answers are either ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’) and the social value of this knowledge. The real purpose of AIDS knowledge here is not so much to protect oneself against infection as to show oneself to be a citizen of the nation.
While this analysis can tell us much about the ideological potential of the text, we still cannot be certain of its ideological effect, which depends not just on what the text does, but also on what readers of the Beijing Evening News do with the text. Some readers might not read it at all, some might scan through it, some might read it thoroughly while not answering the questions, some might answer the questions without submitting the entry form, some might test their friends or spouses, in earnest or in fun.
While we cannot generalize about the effect this text might have in the multitude of different activities and communities of practice into which it is appropriated, its producers are kind enough to give us examples of the effect it is meant to have in an article in the Beijing Evening News several weeks after the publication of the original contest form. The article, entitled ‘The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest Receives a Resounding Reception’, transforms the contest itself into an episode in the history of AIDS in Beijing. Much of it is devoted to describing how readers reported using the contest form to expand their participation in HIV prevention:
11 One reader from Sichuan wrote, he once assumed
12 talk of AIDS was like ‘crying wolf’, that there was no need to make a mountain out of a molehill,
13 but when he saw in the Evening News that more than 10,000 people were infected he was
14 shocked. He said, ‘Reform and Opening Up’ requires studying advanced science and technology
15 not the debauchery of ‘Sexual Openness’, We need to say no to HIV, because we are Chinese.
16 One retired teacher wrote, regarding AIDS, although he didn't turn pale at its mere mention,
17 he did take special care when travelling or going to public places, eating in restaurants and
18 going to the hospital, for fear that he might be infected. Through this activity he learned a lot of
19 about AIDS prevention, which he wants to pass on to his children and those around him.
‘The 'AIDS is Right Beside Us' AIDS Knowledge Contest Receives a Resounding Reception’
China’s Patient Zero
While histories from government documents and health promotion materials, like classical histories in the Chinese tradition, tend to take the nation (or a particular region in it) as the context, and the nation’s rulers and its ‘enemies’ their main actors, with relatively little attention paid to the ‘ordinary people’ (laobaixing) (Jenner 1992), histories in more popular media like newspapers, television, and popular books, focus more on individual AIDS patients and those who come into contact with them, who act as symbols for the nation’s experience with the virus. One need only think of Rock Hudson, or Magic Johnson, or the Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas, dubbed first by Shilts (1987), and subsequently by nearly every major media outlet in America, ‘Patient Zero’, to appreciate the importance of such stories on the public’s perception of AIDS, both in relation to risk behavior and in relation to attitudes towards HIV positive people. Although these histories, which we might call ‘popular histories’ or in some instances ‘commercial histories’, take different forms and appropriate different kinds of cultural tools than the histories in formal government documents or official media mouthpieces, they often draw boundaries in similar ways, and indeed often emanate from official sources.
The second text I would like to look at is an example of such a ‘popular history’, the story of China’s ‘first’ AIDS patient as dramatized in the book AIDS Closes in on China (Aizibing Bijin Zhongguo) by pop sociologist Fang Gang (1995). Whether this narrative constitutes an ‘official’ or an ‘unofficial’ history is difficult to state with any certainty. On the one hand, the story, and the book in which it appears, depends for its commercial appeal on is ‘controversial’ status, the fact that it ostensibly raises topics and presents perspectives not typically addressed (or even actively avoided) in both official discourses and in everyday life, reflecting what Zha (1995) sees as a current trend in popular literature in China for authors to become famous on the basis of ‘taboo-breaking’ or ‘truth-telling’ (Zha 1995). Indeed much of the first chapter is devoted to the author’s repeated claims that what we are reading is in fact China’s first book about AIDS (as well as his claims to have written that same year China’s first book about homosexuality, another taboo topic). On the other hand, there is little in the book that authorities would have any reason to object to, and much, in fact, which appears to promote the ‘Party line’ on AIDS prevention, sexual morality and health care policy. Like many recent commercial publications in China, the book depends for its commercial success on ‘pushing the envelope’, and on its official acceptance on staying within it (Zha 1995, Link 1992).
The story I am concerned with here appears at the beginning of Chapter 2 which is entitled ‘A Special Patient Enters the Hospital’. The actual historical event involved is quite well known; many people I have met in China, in fact, have been able to relate the tale at least in part with reasonable accuracy. It concerns an Argentinean person with AIDS who became ill while travelling in Xian in 1985 and was subsequently transferred to Xiehe hospital in Beijing. After trying several unsuccessful treatments, the staff of the hospital contacted the patient’s doctor in his home country and found out that he had AIDS. There was mass hysteria among the staff, some refusing to administer care to the patient. After the patient died, special measures were taken to disinfect the ward where he had been and everything that he had touched was burned. In addition, all of the healthcare workers who had come into contact with the patient were given an HIV antibody test, none of which confirmed infection. Fang Gang’s retelling of the story draws on tools from both melodrama, as he describes the psychological effect the nation’s first AIDS patient had on those who experienced the event ‘first hand’, and from traditional morality tales, as he portrays the incident as a parable of professionalism and public responsibility. While the contest form constructs knowledge as the nation’s cumulative experience of the epidemic, Fang Gang’s tale of China’s ‘patient zero’ creates from the experiences of the doctors and nurses at Xiehe hospital a symbol of the nation’s knowledge about AIDS.
Although it uses a very different set of cultural tools from the text examined above, the same ‘Discourse of Social Stability’ can be found in the way these tools are configured to draw boundaries in space, in time, and among people. As in the contest form, the nation’s boundary figures prominently in, for example the ‘foreignness’ of the patient (in both ethnicity and behavior) and the premise of the book as a whole which frames AIDS in the context of the nation’s boundaries which are being ‘closed in on’. By calling the foreigner an ‘American’ (meiguo ren) (he was actually Argentinean), Fang Gang, perhaps inadvertently, draws the same kind of boundary seen in the contest’s question about the patient’s nationality, one which erases the borders between all other nations and sees everything as either Chinese or not. Boundaries between the city and the countryside are also featured, with Beijing in general and Xiehe hospital in particular portrayed as centers of knowledge and expertise, superior to places and hospitals outside of Beijing,
Temporal boundaries are also drawn in similar ways, constructing the progression of the epidemic as a series of significant events, or, we might say, significant people. As in the contest form, the moment that AIDS enters the nation is assigned to the discovery of this particular infected individual, who is thus constructed as the ‘origin’ of AIDS in China:
1 One day in June of 1985 is, for Chinese healthcare workers,
2 a day worth remembering; if we can really regard AIDS as an enemy of
3 the entire society, then this day should be remembered by every single Chinese.
4 On this day, China discovered its first AIDS patient.
Similar social boundaries are drawn as well, ones which associate infection with mobility and ‘outsider’ status. China’s first AIDS patient is a liumin in almost every way: he is an outsider, he is a traveler (without a home), he is a diseased body (probably as the result of some ‘inappropriate’ activity), and, typical of liumang, he fails to disclose his ‘true identity’ (as an AIDS patient). But along with the ‘Discourse of Social Stability’ which divides people according to their proximity to the controlling forces of home, family, and work unit, there is another discourse being voiced as well, one which divides people according to their character or quality, what in Chinese is referred to as suzhi.
Suzhi is what distinguishes Beijing from other cities, and Xiehe hospital from other hospitals:
57 Xiehe hospital was, after all, Xiehe hospital. Its staff was impeccably trained,
58 its professional ethics were also first rate.
It is also what distinguishes the staff who live up to this reputation, compassionately ‘put(ting) all of their energy into saving’ ‘this American friend’ (lns. 18-19) and bravely moving the body to the mortuary, despite their fear of infection (lns 58-9) from the ‘low quality’ staff who panic and spread rumors, and from the patient himself who does not even have the decency to reveal his HIV infection, as well as from the other foreigner who visits in lines 40 to 47 and is so lacking in ‘quality’ that he jokes about the solemn topic of AIDS and himself panics when he learns of the existence of the AIDS patient.
This concern with the ‘quality’ of people, places and institutions invokes yet another emerging Discourse of social control in China, one which in many ways complements the ‘Discourse of Social Stability’ discussed above. This ‘Discourse of Quality’, according to Anagnost (1994:274) has become increasingly pervasive in Party rhetoric since the late 80s, being invoked in a wide range of social practices such as birth control, child rearing, sanitation, education, technology, law and eugenics. ‘Quality’ includes physical health and educational attainment (wenhua chengdu ‘cultural level’) as well as public morality and the successful performance of social roles. Recently commercial discourses have expanded the terms to include such characteristics as wealth, sophistication, urban residence and fashion sense (Zhou B.1997).
As in the contest form, all of these boundaries are crucially mediated by the concept of knowledge. The temporal boundary between a ‘China with AIDS’ and a ‘China without AIDS’, for instance’ is drawn not at the moment the patient enters the country, but at the moment his HIV status is discovered. Perhaps a more important distinction than that between a ‘China without AIDS’ and a ‘China with AIDS’ is the distinction the story draws between a ‘China without AIDS knowledge’ and a ‘China with AIDS knowledge’, a distinction between the past, when nurses and doctors didn’t know how to treat AIDS patients and discriminated against them and the present when AIDS patients receive good care as a result of the increased understanding and experience among healthcare workers. Whereas the AIDS is Right Beside Us Contest frames knowledge as history, this story is a history of knowledge, the story of the journey from a state of ignorance to a state of enlightenment, a reinvention of the utopian perspective made possible through the cultivation of ‘quality’.
84 1985 is long ago, nine years have already
85 passed, and in these nine years, over ten AIDS patients have ended their life journeys
86 at Xiehe hospital. Among them have been both Chinese and foreigners. In their final
87 days they received rather good care.
The kind of knowledge portrayed here is not the knowledge of the ‘facts’ of transmission and prevention, but knowledge gained through experience, knowledge which leads one towards a particular code of personal or professional behavior, a particular ‘attitude’, a particular level of suzhi. In this regard, AIDS itself is seen as a test of the ‘quality’ of the nations healthcare workers, and by extension, of the nation as a whole:
81 The phenomenon of AIDS presents a kind of challenge to all healthcare workers, a test
82 of our understanding of the spirit of the profession. Going beyond psychological
83 boundaries is not an easy task….
88 although doctors and nurses went through various psychological and behavioral twists and turns,
89 they were all finally able to take a scientific attitude towards treating AIDS patients and towards
this disease itself.
This merging of the Discourses of ‘Social Stability’ and ‘Quality’ mediated through the concept of knowledge gives to this story a similar ideological potential as the texts examined above. AIDS prevention is seen not in terms individual knowledge of preventive measures but in terms of a collective ‘knowing’, a collective experience of the epidemic leading to a collective effort to police the boundaries of social space and social behavior through the cultivation of a ‘proper attitude’.
Personal histories
In the analysis of this final text we return to the question we asked at the outset of this paper: how do histories of AIDS operate ideologically when individuals appropriate them to take actions in everyday life? What, in other words, are the effects of the boundaries mapped out in texts and the Discourses they invoke on people who use these texts, and how do people manipulate these boundaries and Discourses to suit their own needs in particular situations. This last text is an excerpt of an conversation I had with a gay hotel worker in Fuzhou about how people in his city felt and acted about HIV infection. To explain it to me, he appropriated two narratives, the main one, a recent story in the media about a local prostitute who had been infected with HIV and supposedly had passed in on to a large number of clients, and imbedded within that story, his own version of the story of the first AIDS case in China, which he insisted had been travelling in Fuzhou, not Xian, before being transferred to Xiehe hospital in Beijing.
In appropriating these histories, the speaker reproduces the same boundaries as we observed above and gives voice to the same Discourses. What is more important, however, is how he localizes these boundaries and modifies these Discourses to take particular actions, how he uses them strategically to situate himself in relationship to the nation and to various communities of practice he participates in.
As in the histories we discussed above, AIDS history for this speaker is constructed as a series of significant events, and ‘AIDS knowledge’ consists primarily of the knowledge of these events. This can be seen in the primary temporal boundary in the excerpt, that drawn between the time before the prostitute’s story was reported and the time after.
1 X: In Fuzhou..people got pretty scared after that last incident with the prostitute..
2 before that before this incident..Fuzhou's prostitutes ah, clients ah, and also we gays all
3 felt that AIDS was very far away..but now it seems that AIDS is right beside us...
The speaker’s verbatim appropriation of the health promotion slogan from which the ‘AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest’ takes it’s name, the full version of which is ‘Don’t assume AIDS is far away from us, AIDS is right beside us’ (Buyao renwei aizibing li women hen yuan, aizibing jiu zai women shenbian), acts to situate the local experience of the speaker into the national context created by the slogan. It both makes the history of AIDS in Fuzhou a part of the nation’s history of AIDS and gives the speaker a ‘social language’ within which to frame his individual experience. The slogan is a tifa, a set way of responding to or describing a situation which places the situation (and the speaker) into a recognized social category. And, just as in the both the contest form and the story by Fang Gang, the knowledge of an event of HIV infection brings with it a sense of proximity, proves the tifa. History rather than ‘information’, therefore, is seen as the engine of behavior change.
23 I think the last incident..uh..the one concerning that prostitute
24 who got AIDS..something good came of it..everyone..is very scared ..In Fuzhou
25 everyone is very afraid..as soon as they read about the prostitute..they got scared..
26 A lot of people know about it..even that old lady knows..because the the newspapers and TV
27 continuously reported it..
Again, what mediates between the time when people took no precautions and the time when they began to is knowledge, and again, this knowledge is significantly not knowledge of the routes of transmission of HIV, so much as the knowledge of significant narratives whose effect on readers, hearers and viewers is not cognitive but affective. A proper attitude towards AIDS is the result of a direct or vicarious emotional experience of the consequences of infection:
30 everyone knows about this case..
31 everyone knows how old this girl is and where she's from..the effect this illness had on her family,
32 on her neighborhood, on the people in her village..a horrible effect..everybody knows..uh..even
33 old ladies who can't speak Putonghua know…
112 There was a man..who told the reporter..the reporter was interviewing him..the man was this
113 prostitute's former boyfriend..they didn't show his face..this man had no problem.. he
114 really liked this prostitute..because she was quite beautiful..really liked her.. uh.. but later
115 when he found out she was a prostitute they broke up. so he..
116 I saw that man crying..I saw him crying..
Geographical boundaries from official discourses are also reproduced in the speaker’s retelling of these stories. Not only does the prostitute come from the countryside, reinforcing the portrayal of the spread of AIDS as a movement from rural to urban areas, but she also has a ‘foreign’ connection: the client who is said to have infected her is believed to be from Taiwan, a province which has violated geographical boundaries by separating itself from the motherland, the epitome of a liumang society in official discourse on the mainland. These boundaries exert a direct effect on the speaker’s assessment of the seriousness of AIDS, which only becomes a ‘threat’ insofar as it penetrates the boundaries of the nation and the municipal boundaries of Fuzhou.
The kinds of social groups constructed in this excerpt also conform to the identities observed in the passages examined above: there are prostitutes, clients of prostitutes, gays, people who are residents of Fuzhou and people who are ‘outsiders’. And, as in the official uses of these histories, these identities are predicated on the act of crossing geographical and social boundaries and on the notion of suzhi or ‘quality’.
Here again, suzhi is seen as a function of both geographical origin (urban vs. rural) and of ‘knowledge’ or educational attainment (wenhua chengdu). What makes one vulnerable to HIV infection is not primarily engaging in risk behavior but failure to attain a sufficient level of suzhi.
122 She probably hasn't graduated from elementary school..
123 uh she was around seventeen..nineteen..when she got the disease..the doctor said she
124 was about nineteen when she got it and she was twenty-two when she got sick..
125 ummm..but the doctor..was very sad..very regretfully told her..
126 he said..the disease you have is..AIDS..and then she asked the doctor..she said,
127 What's AIDS..when will I recover..ah when can I leave the hospital...we all say this
128 prostitutes ‘quality’ is so low..now I..I think since her ’quality’ is so low she probably
129 rarely or never used condoms..I guess, probably..when she was serving customers..
130 rarely or never used condoms..or else..she wouldn't say what is AIDS?
Where this text departs from the ideology of official uses, however, is in the way this ‘Discourse of Quality’ is mobilized. Rather than complementing the ‘Discourse of Social Stability’ by assigning ‘quality’ only to those individuals who remain within the boundaries of traditional social roles, this speaker uses the notion of ‘quality’ to subvert these boundaries, creating within the population of liumin a space in which ‘quality’ can in some way mitigate their ‘outsider’ status and reduce their risk of infection. Thus, there are ‘low quality’ prostitutes, like the one in the story, who are unable to protect themselves and others against infection, and ‘high quality’ prostitutes who use condoms:
21 Prostitutes..they usually use them.. especially at the good quality nightclubs..
This Discourse of Quality is also extended to condoms themselves:
15 people who go to prostitutes frequently like higher-priced condoms..they think
16 the material in foreign condoms is better..they say Japanese are better..they told me…
Even sufferers of venereal disease are divided into ‘high quality’ sufferers, who seek treatment in proper hospitals and clinics, and ‘low quality’ sufferers who fail to adopt the proper attitude towards their disease and attempt to treat themselves:
17 There are also some people..with lower educational levels..they seem to me ‘low quality’
18 people, not good..they get gonorrhea..and afterwards say..getting gonorrhea is just
19 like catching cold, have an injection and its okay..some say I won't go to the doctor, I’ll
20 just buy the medicine..since I work at a hotel I know.
In one sense, the dominant ideology of official Discourses is reproduced, particularly the notion that HIV infection is ultimately a consequence of a person’s character rather than just their behavior. In another sense, however, the same ideology is used to legitimate certain people and practices that official Discourses proscribe, allowing the speaker to create a social space for the communities of practice (communities of prostitutes and communities of people who visit prostitutes) that are part of his everyday life as a hotel worker, and, by extension, his own community of practice (the community of men who have sex with men in Fuzhou).
The informant’s retelling of the story of China’s first AIDS patient serves to both complement the primary narrative of the local prostitute by reinforcing the physical, temporal and social boundaries which that story sets up, and also to construct the local story as part of the larger collection of narratives that make up the nation’s history.
What is particularly interesting about the retelling is the degree and accuracy of the detail. There is the initial ‘mystery’ surrounding the patient, the subsequent revelation of HIV infection and mass panic among healthcare workers, the disinfection of the ward and incineration of the patient’s personal effects, and finally, the administration of HIV antibody tests to the healthcare workers who had come into contact with the patient. Even the inaccuracies in the retelling, however, rather than subverting the boundaries set up in official uses of the story, serve to reinforce them. By assigning Fuzhou rather than Xian, as the site at which China’s first AIDS patient first became ill, for example, the speaker, with some degree of pride even, inserts his own city into a significant national narrative, using this story to support the theme of the primary story, that ‘AIDS is right beside us’.
Similarly, the inaccurate memory that the patient had had relations with a number of Chinese prostitutes and had been interrogated by the government, further links the two stories through the construction of ‘prostitutes’ as the ‘bridge’ between foreign and local infection and portrays the patient in a classical liumang role, that of ‘object of interrogation’.
94 X: mmm...I don't remember clearly, but it seems this foreigner had..relations with a lot
95 of Chinese prostitutes, right? It seems more than two or three had relations with him..
96 and the Chinese government wanted him to tell them.. with whom? Which Chinese did you have sex with?..
One of the most important functions of this story lies not however, in the speaker’s recreation of the nation, but in his creation of himself in relation to the nation, and in relation to the people around him. Not unlike the contest form and subsequent responses from readers, it helps the speaker to construct himself as someone possessing ‘AIDS knowledge’, and thus less at risk than the less ‘knowledgeable’ people around him. The story is a demonstration of knowledge
28 China’s first AIDS patient
29 happened in Fuzhou.. you know?..mm..this..is not something many people know..
The function of this story as a demonstration of knowledge is further evidenced by the speaker’s frequent interruption of his telling in order to check his accuracy, asking am I right, is that it? It is almost as if he is taking the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge test and I am meant to give him a score. Other kinds of knowledge contained in the excerpt, on the other hand, are seen as not to be associated with, such as his knowledge of condom use among prostitutes and their clients, and in these instances he distances himself from it by saying ‘I know because I work in a hotel’ (lns. 5, 20).
What makes this demonstration of knowledge strategically important in the excerpt is that it helps him to reconcile his own social role with the Discourses that he has appropriated. Through the meticulous retelling of both of these a historical events, the speaker is in part mediating between his own problematic identity and the identities ‘enforced’ by the Discourses which he has appropriated. Many of the speaker’s practices and the communities in which he engages in them are very much outside the boundaries set up in official uses of history: he is a homosexual, someone who has had sexual contact with foreigners, someone who regularly engages in unprotected anal intercourse (albeit in the context of a stable relationship), and a hotel worker who not only has regular interaction with prostitutes (‘hostesses’) who work in the hotel nightclub, but is involved in teaching them English).
Thus, while the speaker clearly reproduces the boundaries of official Discourses, he uses these boundaries to construct a very different kind of social reality, one in which the mastery of the nation’s stories about AIDS allows him and those around him to take on ‘not at risk’ identities and to participate as legitimate citizens of the nation. Insofar as these stories give the speaker a way to manage his social self, they might in some ways limit his participation in AIDS prevention by, for example, helping him to justify risky practices on the basis of the ‘not at risk’ he has carved out for himself within official Discourses. They might also expand his participation, in obvious ways like those the speaker points out, the affective force of the narrative motivating behavior change: ‘something good came of it..everyone..is very scared’ (ln. 24) or in ways perhaps less obvious, like, for example, as the speaker indicates at the end of the except, providing him and his partner with an excuse to take an HIV anti-body test without having to reveal their liumang identities:
131 So for a variety of reasons..I..I like..I like to go with my boyfriend..every year or every
132 few months..to the hospital to have this kind of test..everytime we go for a test we say..
133 we were with mmm had relations with prostitutes..we’re very worried we didn't use..
134 the doctor asks us if we used a condom..and we say no..the doctor asks us..do you
135 feel uncomfortable..we say little bit..actually we don’t..but I told my lover to say a little
136 uncomfortable..so then the doctor says..you had relations with a prostitute and
you feel uncomfortable..you need to get tested immediately!
Conclusion
In this paper I have explored how histories of AIDS in China are mobilized by official sources to create a collective context for individual action. Far from subordinate to ‘scientific facts’ as they are seen in much Western AIDS discourse, historical narratives are constructed as essential components of ‘AIDS knowledge’ and important tools in prevention. At the same time, we have also seen how the ideological force of such histories is altered as they come into contact with actual people in actual situations. When appropriated into everyday interaction, AIDS histories not only serve to mediate the relationship between the individual and the nation as a whole, but are also used to mediate between the individual and his or her own local context. Along with the re-creation of the ‘nation’ as defined in official uses, individuals appropriate histories to create themselves and the groups to which they belong—national identity is adapted to serve in the construction of social identities, identities which are sometimes very different from the ‘model identities’ presented in the histories themselves.
The boundaries to be considered when histories are viewed as cultural tools, are not limited to those constructed by the text itself, but also necessarily include those constructed by the conditions of its use. When they are appropriated, histories function as what Wenger (1998) calls ‘boundary objects’, texts which form a nexus between communities of practice. Histories can mediate the boundaries between the state and it’s citizens, between various groups within a society, or between individuals and the communities of practice within which they participate. It is on these boundaries that evidence of the ideological force of official histories should be sought, in the tension between the set of boundaries drawn in the histories themselves and the boundaries individuals and communities wish to create when using them.
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