Panic at the Disco-Urse: Episodes from an Analytic Autoethnography about Living with HIV

Abstract

Critical theorists from Walter Benjamin to Arthur Kroker and Debra Lupton have commented on how end-of-century or end-of-millennium social anxieties manifest in crises of social or subjective integrity including widespread social panic responses to perceived threats to such integrity. During the last 2 decades we have seen such a response to a range of public health issues, including obesity, drug use in sport, binge drinking, rural mental health, and the sexual health of social minorities. In this series of autoethnographic reflections, based in the framework of analytic autoethnography established by Leon Anderson (2006), I examine the impact of these panic discourses on the experience of living with a chronic disease. Particularly I examine the medicalization of HIV-infected bodies, the surveillance and governance of HIV-positive bodies, and the systematic distortions to self-care that result from the internalization of tropes of toxic or panic bodies. I also explore the possibilities for an emancipatory resistance to these tropes, and the place of hope and public health citizenship in the subjectivities of the chronically ill.