The AIDS-ed Perestroika. Discourses of Gender in Negotiations of Ideological Consensus in late-socialist Czechoslovakia
Abstrakt
The chapter explores the discourses of AIDS in the late socialist Czechoslovakia and through interrogation of the AIDS metaphors makes visible the ideological labour invested in re-creating and re-construing the socialist consensus and in negotiating the ambivalences and contradictions that shaped socialist reality. Firstly, it analyses the only Czech(oslovak) narrative representation of AIDS in Chytilova's Tainted Horseplay (Kopytem sem, kopytem tam, 1988) to discuss the ways the film's reviews turned AIDS into a trope signifying 'moral decay' (both individual and social), with indications of dissolving social bonds as well as the utter and general collapse of social relationality.
Looking for the implicit gendered associations of these metaphors, I raise questions that have been omitted so far in the studies of perestroika.Secondly, I move on to deconstruct and analyse the outbreak narrative itself and the moral panic in which it was steeped. In its later part, the essay ventures onto a more speculative plane and read the film's semiotics of soma for signs of the inarticulate.
If in the first line of reading, I am interested in the gender underpinnings of the imaginations of the community and its futurity, in the second, I am looking for signs of rupture and breach that mark the difficulty of articulating that which existed in a void and for which positive models of speech appears to have been lacking: masculine subjectivity.