English 276: Colonialism & Postcoloniality

Professor Roy

4 November 1998

"It has been said that the Negro is the link between monkey and man--meaning, of course, white man."

--Frantz Fanon

Along with colonization, the West, and Great Britain in particular, engaged in the project of normalizing the heterosexual. In particular, the heterosexual family unit, headed by one woman, one man, and their children became the focus of Victorian sexual values and the various deployments of sexuality. The heterosexual family unit, and the white woman in particular, became the focus of many anxieties regarding sexuality. The category of the normal, heterosexual family defined itself in a negative way—in terms of that which it was not. It was not abnormal. It was not homosexual. And it certainly was in no way perverted. Yet, in order to cohere, the heterosexual family needed to inscribe perversion somewhere, and did so upon both the body of the homosexual and upon the body of the racialized Other. Mythologies about the potent, often dangerous, sexualities of the colonized came into being, particularly constructed as threats to the normal sexuality of whites, usually in the form of rape, of perversion, and of sexual acts deemed unspeakable. Traces of these discursive strategies remain in the various discourses on AIDS in Africa. Further, I will argue, African AIDS is a Euro-American media and medical construct often used to promote further disciplining of the normal, heterosexual family, primarily in the West, but also in Africa.

Michel Foucault places "the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality" as being constituted in 1870 in the Western discourse on sexuality (43). The same category of the heterosexual would not make its debut until 1880, and in English, it came into being in 1892, not as the norm as it has become thought of now, but itself as a form of perversion. As originally defined, heterosexuality was considered a perversion because it did not have reproduction as its primary aim, but instead sexual gratification was its primary aim (Katz 54). Jonathon Ned Katz argues that it took the intervention of Freud and psychoanalysis to begin to normalize the heterosexual, somewhere in the 1920s but not fully completed until the 1960s (86-87). Similarly, homosexuality would begin to argue it, too, was normal soon after the heterosexual had consolidated herself/himself as normal. By the early 1980s, the categories of heterosexual and homosexual had been in existence for approximately 100 years, albeit an unstable, contested existence. Simon Watney notes that "it is clear that the relatively new emergence of the classificatory system of Western sexuality is by now as completely taken for granted and dehistoricized as Linnaean taxonomy" ("Missionary Positions" 89). Further, this classificatory system has been naturalized and "dehistoricized" upon Africa by the West.

In the discourse on AIDS in the West, particularly in the media, heterosexuality had naturalized itself to the point of near-invisibility. This was particularly the case early in the epidemic, when it appeared to be exclusively a gay disease. As soon as AIDS began showing up among heterosexuals in the West, people began to speak of a heterosexual community, or, more often, of AIDS in the so-called general population. Jan Zita Grover defines general population as follows:

It would be misleading to speak of heterosexuality and homosexuality in binary opposition to one another, as the category of heterosexuality also contrasted itself against other forms of perverse desire and to the modes of desire (ars erotica?) of the people colonized by Europe. Even if the colonized peoples coupled in male-female family units, there remained a certain "not-quite/not-white"-ness about their sexual relations in the eyes of their European colonizers. Frantz Fanon wrote

Diana Fuss raises the question of whether we can use the Euro-American psycho-medical categories of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual when discussing sexuality in Africa.

And yet, it is the heterosexual nature of AIDS in Africa that is causing anxiety in the Western world. If AIDS can be transmitted via heterosexual sex in Africa, can it not also be transmitted through heterosexual sex in Europe and North America? Therefore, differentiation between Pattern One, or Euro-American AIDS, and Pattern Two, or African AIDS is established, and the vectors of transmission of each pattern are sought after. This quest returns us to the colonial mythologies of the unruly, African sexuality, and other colonial mythologies. For example, Cindy Patton notes that

One might wonder, with all this wrangling over which heterosexuals can and can’t get AIDS, why the possibility of African homosexuality, bisexuality, or other alternative modes of erotic pleasures is ignored. The discourse on AIDS, because it adheres to the Western conception of binary sexuality (homo/hetero), leaves itself no options but to consider African AIDS heterosexual by ruling out the possibility of African homosexuality. As I noted before about heterosexuality defining itself negatively, this again is a negative definition of heterosexual African AIDS. By virtue of the fact that it isn’t homosexual, it must be heterosexual. In this construction, there are no other options. Yet, the denial of the possibility of homosexuality in Africa is not unique to the Western discourse on AIDS. These denials take place on all sides, by colonized, by neo-colonial, and by colonialist alike. For example, African nationalist Frantz Fanon denies the possibility of a Negro homosexuality not once, but twice, in addition to other declarations, which, at least prima facie, appear homophobic. First, in a footnote, Fanon remarks

As I noted earlier, Fanon is not the only person to deny the possibility of male-male sexual behavior in Africa between Africans. The Euro-American media and medical officials, as well as neo-colonial governmental officials, also deny that homosexuality exists in Africa, or at least within the Africa of their purview. Cindy Patton notes that "black male-male relationships are invisible, and ‘homosexuality’ is illegal under laws governing white conduct. White male-male relations are unlawful and black male-male relations invisible in the eyes of the South African government" ("Inventing ‘African AIDS’" 90). Unlike Fanon, the possibility of White-black male-male relations is completely ignored by the South African government in its attempt to respond to the problem if HIV/AIDS in its mines. However, again like Fanon, black male-male sexual formulations have been rendered invisible. Yet, Patton writes,

The denial that homosexuality exists in Africa is understandable from the point of view of figures such as Fanon and the African neo-colonial governments. The West had, for a long time, ascribed to Africa a range of perversions, and often connected primitiveness with homosexuality. What is problematic is the West’s shift from connecting primitive homosexuality in Africa to denying the possibility of an African homosexuality altogether in both the medical and media discourses on HIV/AIDS. While the safer sex mantra in the West has shifted from characterizing homosexuals as a risk group to trying to teach safer sex to all, particularly targeting "men who have sex with men" (a phrase which includes bisexual men and straight men who engage in rough trade, as opposed to the limited category of homosexual), this shift in phraseology has not occurred in the discourse on Africa. Heterosexuals are considered at risk, rather than "men who have sex with women" and "women who have sex with men." The question becomes why has the West invisibilized the African man who has sex with other African men?

I wrote earlier that heterosexuality defines itself in a negative way—as opposed to that which it is not, rather than characterizing what it is. And two of its definitions of itself are that it is not homosexuality and it is not perversity. In this discourse, AIDS has become a sign by which normal heterosexuality proves itself, and furthermore, it serves to discipline normal heterosexuals. The figure of the gay male with AIDS is familiar to the West and close at hand, and the mechanisms by which Western media and medical discourse have scapegoated him are familiar. The message, reiterated, becomes "don’t be homosexual, you’ll get AIDS and die." (And who, honestly, hasn’t seen something similar scrawled on a bathroom wall, including at a University campus, recently?) But AIDS is also used to discipline heterosexuality into normality. African AIDS must be heterosexual in order to function properly to discipline Western heterosexuality away from perversity. Therefore, the causes of African AIDS are alternately explained as prostitution, as promiscuity, and as (hetero)sexual practices so bizarre they are indescribable in Western medical terms. The message here is "don’t be promiscuous, don’t become a prostitute, missionary position only" (in more ways than one—more on that later).

Positioning African sexuality as heterosexual not only posits a tri-partite scheme of sexuality (homo-, hetero-, and bisexual), but all the Western categories of sexuality posit a binary gender structure of man/woman. Heterosexual, as it is used, implies that relationships form primarily between men and women, as people are categorized. Homosexual implies relationships form primarily between men or between women. And bisexual implies a person who forms relationships with either gender, the binary nature of gender as it is understood in the West built into the term itself. Diana Fuss questions whether the Western specification of sexuality can apply to African sexuality, but it’s also important to question whether the Western categories of gender can be accurately applied to Africa in any meaningful sense. By projecting an exclusively heterosexual model of sexuality onto Africa through the discourse of AIDS, the West also projects a binary model of gender onto Africa, but this message is so covert, that it goes utterly without saying. In fact, alternative structurings of gender do not occur to anyone in the discourse on AIDS.

Frantz Fanon, in his comments, shows without intending to that gender is far more complex than it is given credit for. He speaks about the Martinican men who dress in "skirts and shirts" but who can also "take a punch like any ‘he-man.’" He is quick to rescue them from homosexuality, in a rhetorical maneuver that at the same time identifies cross-gender expression with homosexuality. He refers to these men, significantly, as "godmothers" of the community rather than godfathers. By claiming they "lead normal sex lives" (presumably, Fanon means that heterosexual is equivalent to normal, although the claim is contestable territory), is Fanon claiming they lead "normal sex lives" as men or as women? The categories shift around here, particularly if one is attempting to uphold a binary gender structure.

Leslie Feinberg, in her study of transgender expression throughout history, finds numerous examples of transgender expression in Africa, including in areas of Africa most impacted by AIDS. Feinberg writes "women and trans spiritual leaders continue to coexist in this century. Although South African Zulu diviners are usually women, some are male-to-female diviners. Among the Ambo people of southern Angola, even in this century, women – including trans women – serve the deity Kalunga" (45). She also writes that

Furthermore, the West’s neat sexual taxonomies get confused if the possibility of AIDS through African homosexuality is entertained. Benedict Anderson writes:

But, in the straight mind, AIDS has become closely connected with homosexuality in the West. In order for the project of disciplining Western heterosexuality to work, not only must AIDS in Africa be heterosexual, but there must be no doubt about its heterosexuality, either. The possibility of African male-male sexuality must be rendered invisible, even if temporarily. If the discourse became tainted with the possibility of an African male-male sexuality, the possibility that African AIDS might be transmitted through homosexual sex is opened up, undermining efforts to discipline heterosexuality, both Western and African. Patton notes that she "remain[s] perplexed by Westerners’ insistence that there is no homosexuality in Africa—after all, it would have been much simpler to lay AIDS at the door of a single ‘perversion.’ Yet Western homosexual panic works overtime in AIDS discourse: homosexuality is more controllable if it can be retained as a category of Western bourgeois culture" ("From Nation to Family" 232). This disciplining has largely been the focus of AIDS prevention and safer sex education programs in Africa, particularly with its focus on monogamy over condom use; in the West, heterosexual African AIDS has been held out as a signifier for the possibility of an heterosexual Western AIDS. Cindy Patton notes that

The West engages in a "therapeutic or normalizing intervention" in Africa, through the discourses of safer sex, and particularly as they are articulated in Africa. Yet, this "intervention" also has the effect of disciplining African sexuality, and it deploys Western notions of sexuality in order to promote monogamy (or "stable polygamy"). Simon Watney writes

Beyond the problematic of employing Western notions of sexuality to assess the heterosexuality of African AIDS, there is the problem of assessing the level of HIV/AIDS infection in Africa altogether. By most accounts, both medical and media, AIDS is assessed by a variety of indirect means, never through actual numbers, ostensibly because African nations cannot be relied upon to report accurately. The New York Times reports that

What is not mentioned in these facile claims of the untrustworthiness of the African to tell the truth about AIDS is the role international health organizations play: certain African governments, such as Uganda’s, offer subsidies for schooling to the children of mothers who test positive for HIV. This would tend towards encouraging greater accuracy, as the women who test negative "were seen to weep openly when they were told," according to Nellie Mathu (667). This is a horrible set-up, in fact, which has the effect of encouraging women to "get infected, get subsidy" (Mathu 667).

Another problem with the statistics is that when reporting African cases, the West tends to interpret the statistics from a major metropolitan center, such as Nairobi, as being indicative of the statistics of the entire nation, in this case, Kenya. Yet, no one would imagine taking the HIV rates of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and/or New York as being indicative of the nationwide epidemic. Douglas A Feldman writes that "except for villages in southwestern Uganda, northwestern Tanzania, and now northern Rwanda (near the Ugandan border), AIDS is primarily an urban disease in Africa. This is perhaps one of the most baffling questions facing anthropologists who will work in the area of AIDS in Africa" ("Cofactors in Africa" 50). Given that "AIDS is primarily an urban disease in" the United States and other Western countries, what must be "most baffling" to Feldman would be the fact that HIV in Africa ("HIV-1") is similar to HIV in North America and Europe ("HIV-2"). In fact, these similarities have been cause for panic and puzzlement, leading researchers to search for connections between African heterosexuality and North American and European homosexuality. The designation of HIV-1 and HIV-2, respectively, is used to construct a division within the medical understanding of the disease’s epidemiology. At the same time, researchers hold that the diseases are spread the same and that the risk factors are identical, as are the modes of prevention. Some epidemiologists posit that gay and bisexual men and Africans are subject to a microbial intestinal protozoa that makes them particularly at risk for HIV because they start out immunosuppressed (Feldman, "Cofactors in Rwanda" 47-48). As earlier, the link between African and homosexual male, in the medical discourse, is anal (and, it’s always implied, perverse). At the same time, however, the two patterns must be differentiated, in spite of any similarities claimed, and these similarities and differentiations always serve the same purpose—to distance Western heterosexuality from the perverse, be it African or queer.

As I noted earlier, there are multiple problems with reading the HIV statistics from Africa. The Western media, for example, believes the numbers to be under-reported, and there are a good number of reasons why this would be so. Many of the sub-Saharan African nations depend upon tourism for a certain amount of their gross national product. Furthermore, in cities such as Nairobi, some of this tourism income takes the form of Western sailors and military men who come into port looking for women. Malcolm D. Gibson writes that

Fears of miscegenation and reverse colonization run through much of the commentary on African AIDS, especially as a heterosexually transmitted disease. Particularly, it is often implied in medical literature on African AIDS that it could have the same impact in North America and Europe as it’s having in Africa and among gay and bisexual men in the West. Furthermore, the potential threat to Western heterosexuality, rather than the very real threats to Africans or homosexuals, are the rallying points for further research on AIDS in Africa. Douglas Feldman, for example, writes "it appears inevitable that if risk reduction interventions are not carried out, non-IV drug using heterosexual spread of the virus in North America and Europe may eventually become the most prevalent form, especially in inner cities" ("Cofactors in Rwanda" 51). While this remains a looming fear, it’s also one that’s incredibly uncertain, one source reporting that "the risk of a heterosexual epidemic of HIV infection and AIDS in North America and Europe on the scale of the current African epidemic cannot be predicted with any certainty" (Piot 110). AIDS once again manifests itself as a postmodern disease, full of complications, contradictions in signification, and rendering Western medical discourse uncertain, at least for normative, Western heterosexuality. Furthermore, as noted above, there’s a very significant concern in the West that heterosexuality will be colonized by AIDS, either through the vectors of bisexual men to women to heterosexual men, or through direct heterosexual contact with in Africa.

Susan Sontag has explored the metaphorization of AIDS, looking at how the Western medical establishment has used metaphoric themes of invasion, of war, and of conquering, either in describing the behavior of the virus, or in describing how the virus can be overcome (another military metaphor). Sontag calls these military metaphors, but they are also metaphors of colonization. In fact, any virus is often described in terms that serve as metaphors of Western colonization: the replacement of the cell’s DNA with the virus’ own, the penetration of the cellular wall, and the virus directing the cell to replicate itself, rather than perform its normal functions. All three are good examples of how one might see viral infection, in general, as metaphoric for colonization of the cell by the virus.

Beyond the metaphors of the virology of HIV/AIDS, however, Susan Sontag elucidates some of the more disturbing colonial metaphors associated with AIDS, particularly involving Africa. Sontag notes that

The processes of blame can be seen in now discredited, but still prevalent in the popular imagination, scientific narratives of the origins of AIDS. The most common narrative says that AIDS originated by crossing over from the green monkey in central Africa to Africans (the means of this crossing over are often obscured, but some perverse sexuality is often implied—either that, or the narrative hints at the Africans eating the green monkeys), from Africans to Haitians, from Haitians to North American homosexuals, from homosexuals to bisexuals, and from bisexuals to heterosexual women (or, the general population). Other narratives seek the origins in African swine fever, and Alex Shoumatoff imagines that AIDS originated at Lake Victoria in Uganda, the origin of the Nile River (131-133). These narratives display the variety of anxieties and phobias Western heterosexuality has about both homosexuality and Africa. The logical leaps required to make the green monkey narrative cohere require one to subscribe to certain prejudices about Africa and homosexuality. As I noted, one must believe that Africans are uncivilized and would either eat monkeys without cooking them, or that they’d have sex with monkeys. To the Western mind, as Fanon shows us over and over, this is not a logical leap at all, but the psychology of colonialism. Another particularly vexing part of this narrative involves the denial of African homosexuality: if the narrative is to hold true, how did HIV cross into the North American homosexual community, if Africans are not homosexual? Of course, the logical leap would be to argue that the sexual restrictions that bar African homosexuality do not seem to bar Haitian homosexuality.

While science sought connections to African swine fever, of the anality of African sexuality, for microbes present in both Africans and North American gay men that would suppress the immune system, the only hard facts that could be relied upon was that HIV was transmissible, in either pattern, through sexual intercourse, through blood transfusion by infected blood, and from mother to fetus. Not only does this put heterosexuality at risk, but it makes reproductive sex, which is essentially heterosexual sex without a condom, incredibly risky for everyone involved: man, woman, and child. Not only does this threaten the institution of heterosexuality; it also threatens the entire Western family structure. Therefore, it is from this front that AIDS in Africa has been attacked.

Cindy Patton, in "From Nation to Family," writes that AIDS is reconstructing the map of Africa through epidemiology. The West, she argues, is characterizing all of Africa as being at risk, when it is only certain parts of Africa, certain cities in certain nations. In this article, Patton indicates that the Western medical researchers sometimes claim that the HIV rate in a major urban area is the HIV rate for the entire nation. If this were applied in the United States, our HIV statistics would certainly be higher, nationwide, if we only used New York and San Francisco, or any other major urban center, as basis for nation-wide statistics, or even for state-wide estimates. Clearly, different models of statistical analysis are being used for African regarding their rate of HIV/AIDS. Oftentimes, as I’ve noted, the Western researchers admit to inflating the figures because they believe them to be underreported. The effect this has had has been to position entire nations, in fact entire regions, of Africa as being in grave danger.

The border of the nation is dissolving into a larger category, "Sub-Saharan Africa" or, simply, "Africa." The maps of the impact of AIDS in Africa, in many ways, resemble Victorian British maps of other countries, using different pigments and dyes for different zones of infection rates. Africa, as a community, is being re-imagined, re-mapped, and re-imaged through epidemiological statistics and rates of infection. Benedict Anderson writes about nation-making through map-making that "like censuses, European-style maps worked on the basis of a totalizing classification, and led their bureaucratic producers and consumers towards policies with revolutionary consequences" (173). This is certainly the case with maps indicating the infection rates in Africa: the revolutionary consequences, in this case, being the dissolution of the nation-state in Africa in favor of the infection zone, at least in the imaginations of the Western media and medical establishments. Cindy Patton, responding to a map of the spread of African AIDS in the New York Times, notes:

Over one hundred years ago, the homosexual was first identified in the West. Shortly thereafter, the heterosexual was imagined into being as a parallel version of pervert. The association of heterosexuality with perversion has not been completely shaken, but it has been displaced onto the African heterosexual, and this can be seen most clearly in the media and medical responses to AIDS in Africa. Denials of the possibility of an African homosexuality exist on the parts of all those who are allowed to speak for the African with AIDS: the media, the medical establishment, and the government. Conceiving of the possibility of an erotic organization other than heterosexuality opens up an radical other to the Othering already being done to the African by the West, a possibility that would cause doubt in the in the moralizing mission. Africa, long considered to be the Dark Continent, a dangerous continent, is experiencing a new version of this old story, begun with colonization and never shaken in the post-colonial state. The West’s conception of Africa as one teeming entirety of danger and perversion is being reinscribed through the cartography of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. On the one hand, this cartography redraws new boundaries around epidemiological risk, and on the other hand, reinscribes those risk zones as ending at with the political boundaries, depending upon the map and the statistical methodology used in drawing it. Metaphors of the threat of the reverse colonization of the West by Africa are rife through much of the literature on African AIDS: AIDS as an invader from Africa, and so forth. Yet, through all the commentary on AIDS in Africa, particularly by that by the West, the voice of the African with AIDS is never heard. He or she is always spoken for, but can never speak on his or her own behalf. This is not particularly surprising, considering that the three institutions doing most of the speaking on AIDS in Africa are the Western media, Western science, and African governments. Both the Western media and Western science reserve for themselves the right of interpretation of data, which disallows the possibility that the infected individual could possibly have anything to say on her or his own behalf about AIDS or the circumstances under which she or he got infected. And the African governments, many of them neo-colonial in nature, are also used to speaking for their citizen-subjects, as many governments are used to doing. The African with AIDS cannot represent him- or herself, and therefore, he or she must be represented—in this case, however, it is not by institutions that necessarily have the well being of the African in mind.