Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media PDF
Preview Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media
Policing Desire Pornography, Aids and The Media This page intentionally left blank POLICING DESIRE PORNOGRAPHY, AIDS AND THE MEDIA Third Edition Simon Watney Media and Society Richard Bolton, series editor University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis Copyright 1987, 1989, 1996 Simon Watney All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design (Wales), Ebbw Vale Cataloging-in-Publication Data for this book are available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-8166-3024-0 (he) ISBN 0-8166-3025-9 (pb) The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunities educator and employer. Contents Acknowledgements vi Preface (Second Edition) ix Preface (Third Edition) xv Introduction 1 1 Sex, diversity and disease 7 2 Infectious desires 22 3 Moral panics 38 4 Aids, pornography and law 58 5 Aids and the press 77 6 Aids on television 97 7 Safer representations 122 8 Epilogue 134 Conclusion (Second Edition) 146 Conclusion (Third Edition) 152 Notes 157 Resources: 1996 167 Index 171 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff over many years at the library of the Terrence Higgins Trust in London, and also the workers at the HIV Project and the National Aids Manual. Such services are literally invaluable in much of my everyday work. I would also like to thank Steve Cook at Cassell for rekindling enthusiasm for this book. In retrospect, I would like to register my thanks to three friends who were especially supportive to me in my early Aids work, all three now long dead and much missed - David Rampton, Charles Barber, and Dr Simon Mansfield. Special thanks also, as always, to my great friend John Paul Philippe. VI For C. A. B. This page intentionally left blank Preface (Second Edition) The main text of the first edition of Policing Desire was wtitten in the space of six weeks in the early autumn of 1986, with the full expectation of immediate publication. Unfortunately, a number of circumstances combined to delay the book's appearance for more than a year. This at least allowed me to add the epilogue in the spring of 1987. It was eventually published in Britain by Comedia/Methuen, and in the United States by the University of Minnesota Press, which had kindly expressed support and encouragement at a time when any form of British publication seemed uncertain. All of the above only serves to demonstrate the difficulty of making strategic interventions against the grain of dominant Aids commentary, which has remained largely impervious to modification since its genesis in the earliest years of the epidemic. Besides, the constantly changing demands of the moment are often hard to reconcile with the felt need to develop long-term analysis. This is especially the case for those like myself who work closely with hard-pressed Aids service organisations. Our wish to be effectively proactive in relation to the cultural politics of Aids is constantly undermined by the pragmatic obligation to be continually reactive. It is perhaps worth pointing out, however, that many of those who have contributed most to our understanding of the social aspects of Aids have done so from outside The Academy.1 In this respect I take some comfort from Stuart Hall's timely observation: "In a permanently transitional age we must expect uneveness, contradictory outcomes, disjunctures, uncompleted projects, overlapping emergent ones".2 In retrospect, I remain firmly convinced of the need to address questions concerning the operations of fantasy and the unconscious in relation to our (provisional) understanding of the political and ideological economies of this epidemic. If anything, the need for a psychoanalytic perspective is more pressing than before, given the nature of the belated responses to Aids from mainstream criticism, sociology, historiography, and so on.' For as Jaqueline Rose suggests: "If ideology is effective, it is because it works at the most rudimentary levels of psychic identity and drives".4 At the same time it is equally important to sustain a fully political reading of the epidemic, in IX
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