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.The rhetorical useof these photos maintains the pristine quality of the science of AIDS found in NorthAmerican and European laboratories the lovingly photographed viruses while atthe same time distancing the origin and effects of that virus onto the central African3 In the question period following delivery of this as a paper, the vast majority of theaudience acknowledged that they too were surprised that this discovery was news.Thescientific debunking of the green monkey theory of viral origin sank without a trace in thepopular media.4 Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.65.5 Scientific American, The Science of AIDS: Readings from Scientific AmericanMagazine (New York: W.H.Freeman, 1989). Perverse Desire and Viral Exchange in the Origin of AIDS 61bodies, both simian and human.The representations further underscore the allegedlysimian origin of AIDS the authors list the most likely candidate as the African greenmonkey and its African connections, connections which are tenuous at best andcontradictory at worst.The way in which these inconsistencies are papered over isrevealed through a graphic which provides a quick comparison table of various typesof monkeys and their viruses, and man and his virus.The iconic representations ofline drawings of various monkeys and a lounging man wearing sunglasses recreatethe standard evolution of man through ascending orders of primates, in ways whichsuggest both the plausibility of the relationship between simian and human immunedeficiency viruses, and a potential mechanism for it (evolution), without offeringany direct evidence of either.The privileged position of scientific and medical discourses, such as those withinThe Science of AIDS, has increasingly been problematized and opened up by thetools of textual analysis; critiques by feminist and queer theorists have advanced thisproject as it pertains to AIDS.As Michael Scarce notes in Harbinger of Plague ,A great deal is at stake in viewing scientific knowledge as culturally constructedknowledge, for this allows one to begin to understand science within its context, notsimply as unquestionable truth and objective fact.& A study of scientific knowledgecan reveal as much about the culture from which it was produced as the world whichit attempts to explain and unravel & The reflexive acknowledgment that sciences areladen with the values of the cultures from which they stem provides an entry point fordisruption in the sense of re-imagining scientific knowledge in ways that are less sexist,racist, classist, and homophobic.6Moreover, while Scarce identifies his disruption of scientific discourse as potentiallyrecuperative, a critique of scientific discourse in light of the experience of AIDSprovides us not with a series of fully formed alternatives, but rather with a series offragments, partial stories, which point to the violence with which these narratives ofscience were constructed.Paula Treichler s observation that AIDS is an epidemic of signification and aplague of discourse locates that originary violence, as well as the locus of potentialintervention, within language.7 Or to put it another way, the frames which scienceprovides to organize experience and information necessarily, as Steven Epsteinnotes, work to exclude alternative ways of interpreting an experience.8 For instance,Epstein observes that distinctions between primary and predisposing causes of AIDSwere lost once the debate moved Outside of the medical and scientific professions.He adds that the various usages of the word cause not only blurred these meaningsbut embedded notions of causation within a more general vocabulary of moral blame &6 Michael Scarce, Harbinger of Plague: A Bad Case of Gay Bowel Syndrome , Journalof Homosexuality, 34:2 (1997), p.2.7 Paula Treichler, AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic ofSignification , in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed.Douglas Crimp (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1988), p.31.8 Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.50, my emphasis. 62 Economies of Representation, 1790 2000[and] the genesis of the new epidemic of immune dysfunction was considered alltoo often with a view to assigning culpability
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