Page 78 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

72 CULTURAL STUDIES

of the developed world over the economically disadvantaged countries by way of
correlating heterosexuality with the danger of exotic microbes, the very label of
‘Asian AIDS’ reinscribes Euro-American bodies and desires—the travelling
farang (the figure of the ornate but vulgar male foreigner, in Thai language)—as
part of the resonating narrative of disaster now experienced by the peoples of
Pacific and Southeast Asia.
The grand narratives of Pacific militarism and Asian economic development in
the 1990s, coinciding with the historical narrative of Thailand as ‘concubine’ to
the West that was first articulated in the European literature of the early twentieth
century, continue to invent a certain global conception of Thai sexuality as the
primary site of exotic maladies evolving into the AIDS disaster. Yet in
continuing this orientalist impulse, these narratives bring into focus the world’s
attention on the scandal of promiscuous pleasure that was once hailed by the
military-industrial-tourist complex as its justifiably naughty rights. Seen in this
way, Asia in the ruins of AIDS functions as a giant confessional, a space in
which open secrets, half-truths, dodges, and sometimes outright lies and denial
are most productive, and therefore a space most capable of mystification. In the
neocolonial construction of ‘Asian AIDS’, what is historically and geopolitically
marginal and in need of control turns out to be symbolically and psychosexually
central. As with Africa, ‘Asian AIDS’ is about the global distribution and
trafficking of resources, desire, and power. But unlike it, the First World’s
construction of ‘Asian AIDS’ reverberates with a charged, suggestive, nagging
silence.
I am convinced that the story of HIV/AIDS in Asia is realistically a
fragmented narrative, punctuated by orientalist, anti-orientalist, and self-
orientalizing tendencies, and is therefore necessarily jumbled, shuffled, and
agitated by these political and cultural thrusts. More of a ‘war of positions’ made
up of contrasting and shifting voices than a monolinguistic and unified narrative,
and less unidirectional than circular, this story realistically resists stable and
totalizing definitions. Nor is the story complete at this historic moment. The
challenge of discussing the media representations of the pandemic in Asia is to
highlight the provisional and jumbled nature of competing voices in the First
World/Third World divide, as well as the racial and gender divides. I propose to
treat the representational voices as moving vectors that travel inside and
alongside the forces of power, despair, confusion, and community empowerment
that the global pandemic has forged. The conceptualization of the mobile,
travelling voices enables us to think of them as temporary, mimetic, and adaptive.
What follows is an imaginary dialogue on the devastating reality of the AIDS
epidemic in Thailand. The purpose of the dialogue is to elaborate some of the
arguments sketched above. I weave together a kind of tapestry of narratives,
vignettes that are drawn from media orientalism. Whether these narratives are
included here simply to witness or to be commented upon, they have a tendency
to cross over to each other, so that no one voice tells a definitive story, so that
every voice poaches. I want to use the tapestry to suggest that the historicity and