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"Can
You Feel it, Joe?" Ed Madden
"He positioned himself to me, like he wanted to be touched."- a doctor in "Scenes from an AIDS Ward," Village Voice (22 Feb 1994) In an essay on contemporary American literature about AIDS, Joseph Cady draws a distinction between two categories of texts: "immersive" texts, which "immerse" a reader through direct contact with the emotions and particularities of experience, and "counter-immersive" texts, or those that distance a reader through humor, narrative shifts, other rhetorical devices. When I teach AIDS literature in a medical humanities program, Cady's language offers a particularly useful distinction for my students. It echoes themes of touch (contact, proximity, understanding) and distance (stigma, silence, disavowal) we find repeatedly at work in AIDS literature--which must address anxieties about homosexuality as well as a stigmatized disease, homosexuality often linked to both social illness and physical disease as it becomes linked to HIV through the 1980s. Even as HIV demographics of infection shift, the residue of stigma remains. AIDS art repeatedly addresses issues of stigmatization; it also repeatedly offers invocations of touch--both literal and figurative. Further, art addressing mainstream audiences, such as Philadelphia or a 1996 episode of Touched by an Angel, works to create moments of empathetic identification--the action of Philadelphia pivots around a dizzying and problematic scene of requested empathy through a shared artistic (operatic) text. In this presentation, I will explore the languages of immersion, empathy, and touch, examining the ways these texts simultaneously negotiate both biological disease and socially stigmatized illness, working toward a social healing, even without medical cure.
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