T-shirts and Holograms: Corporeal Fetishes in AIDS Choreography, c. 1989

I am writing this introduction on September 11, 2001, feeling strangely numb as I watch the news coverage of the day's events unfold. From this position of detachment--brought on, perhaps, by wounds unhealed from yet another cataclysm, an epidemic, the greatest tragedy to affect my life thus far--I am struck by the way in which one's perception of what is happening in New York City is shaped by a calculated set of emotional punctuation points, by elegiac moments when the smooth-voiced news readers disappear into the anonymity of their studios and the television screen is given over to poetic assemblages of video footage, often accompanied by sorrowful strains of music. (Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, played at countless AIDS funerals, serves this purpose on one television station.) The images are repetitious: we see the first tower aflame, then the steeply banking plane that collides malevolently with the second, then the collapse of the two followed by footage of running and dazed passersby and rescue personnel embracing one another for comfort, the latter in slow motion. We know these visuals well, having seen them many times within the first hours of the terrorist attack.

The final images in these montages, however--in sharp contrast to the steel-twisting collapse of the buildings--are inevitably more mundane and quotidian and thereby more arresting: a dusty shoe strewn amidst the rubble, a business letter addressed to a concern with the address 1 World Trade Center, burned at the edges, or a photograph of a lost loved one. This is where colossal tragedy meets individual loss. And this is where tragedy meets the body, where the force of loss is felt like a shuddering tremor in the bones. A real person wore that shoe; a pink, blood-engorged hand penned that letter; a vibrant living body was captured in that photograph. And now that person, that hand, that body is gone, obliterated. This is tragedy felt at the level of a single beating heart. This is where the pain of loss is most searing.

In his now-classic 1995 essay, "Memorial Rags," literary critic Michael Moon teaches us that personal affects, be they made of leather, cloth, or paper, are the relics that shape the particularities of our grief. ¹ Contextualized within tragic circumstances, these personal items are transformed into fetishes of loss and remembrance, deeply erotic and deeply elegiac in the same instant. The fetish's capability to serve both functions--erotic and melancholic--is not obvious until one reads Moon. Freud's notion of the fetish as a furry replacement for the penis, as a palliative to control rampant anxieties attendant upon seeing or not seeing this most essential (to Freud, anyway) body part, leaves little wiggle room for the idiosyncratically human, for the preciously quotidian. ² Moon's explication of the term "fetish," combining the eroticism of Freud's fetish with Freud's more nuanced notion of melancholia, however, results in a newly homoerotic view of the process of grieving when set in simultaneous relation to Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser" and to the AIDS epidemic in the US, accomplishing a radical reorientation of the fetish and fetishism. ³ Moon accomplishes this feat in service of a new gay male poetics, custom-made for the AIDS era. But I want to argue that fetishism displays its essential characteristics and its efficaciousness even more resonantly in choreographic terms than in written or strictly "poetic" form. This essay, then, is an attempt to recover and redefine the fetish along the lines of Michael Moon's analysis, but specifically as it appears in the theatrical AIDS dance in the year 1989, a hotspot in the arc of the AIDS epidemic when the weight of human loss proved nearly unbearable.

The method I use to conjure these choreographies is a form of close reading, but not of the kind associated with New Criticism...