Ambiguous elements: Rethinking the gender/sexuality matrix in an epidemic

This essay focuses on the relationship between gender and sexuality and how they are understood and contested within the dominant constructions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. It also endeavors to explore how they can serve as a resource for changing those constructions. It insists on theorizing sexuality and gender together, even as it attends, and I think it must, to the specificities of each axis. As the epidemic approaches its third decade, how sexuality and gender can be reconceptualized, and more importantly how their interimplications can be theorized, may have the potential to reframe how the epidemic is defined. The need for such a refraining is clear: over the past sixteen years in the U.S., frustrations have been escalating in the care-giving, social service, and activist communities over the serious incongruence be- tween people's concrete and varied experiences in the epidemic and the dominant social and scientific practices operating on narrow and deadly cultural assumptions about sexual and gendered realities. Of late, the social acceptance of the common knowledge and definition about the epidemic, most notably in the areas of epidemiology and safe sex education, masks the continuing and escalating instability exactly in those same areas. For instance, how do we make sense of the discouraging news about “new” infection in populations not easily identified along taken-for-granted sexual, gender, racial, or class lines (such as the growing cases of infection among white middle-class heterosexual teenagers)? How should we begin to acknowledge the risk of infection among bisexual men and women (and to acknowledge their existence as bisexuals)? How do we grapple with the reality and consequences of those sexual choices (gay and non-gay alike) that seem to defy the canonical approach to safe sex? The theoretical inquiry by feminism and queer theory about the complexity of gendered and sexual formations, identities, and practices—an inquiry preceding the epidemic—takes on a charged significance in the face of continued failure to apprehend gender and sexual differences in this ever-changing epidemic.