Contaminated Drug-Using Bodies

Abstract

Since the beginning of the ‘AIDS epidemic’, prostitutes and injecting drug users have been blamed for transmitting HIV/AIDS to the heterosexual community. This emphasis on deviant bodies as cultural embodiments of material conduits of HIV/AIDS has been a consistent theme in public health policies and legal discourses, as well as biomedical and scientific research. Interestingly enough, it was the deviant bodies of female injecting drug users who accounted for the greatest number of reported cases of HIV/AIDS among Western women (Brook et al., 2000). While the impact on women’s bodies on a global scale has been given some prominence in the HIV/AIDS debates, there are similarities between women at risk in places such as Africa and the United States — similarities which are socio-political, as well as rooted in poverty and power imbalances between the sexes (Wenzel and Tucker, 2005: 154).

The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made Him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon for his hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things. But Death had no home and he knew it at once. ‘And where shall I dwell in my dwelling?’ Old Death asked, for he was already old when he was made. ‘You shall build a place close to the living, yet far out of the sight of eyes. Wherever there is a building, there you have a platform that comprehends the four roads of the winds. For your hunger, I give you the first and last taste of all things.’ We had been born, so Death had his first taste of us. We had built things, so he had his platform in our yard. And now, Death stirred from his platform in his secret place in our yard, and came inside the house.

Zora Neale Hurston (1986: 27)