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Disclosure 119 AdventuresinOnlineCruising It is surely not a surprise if laws so often mandate that one’s HIV status be disclosed before engaging in certain sexual practices, for there is something in the very act of disclosing that, in the absence of concerted attempts to the contrary, makes it nearly impossible not to see the object of the disclosure in negative terms. This is the logic of the confession, with which our notions of disclosure tend to be entangled and that actually performs the sin or the crime into existence.When confessing, rather than sharing, his or her pathological status, a person with HIV becomes disciplined—­meaning both known and policed—­ and, thanks to this joint operation of the clinic and the police, eventually cast out one way or another. To disclose one’s HIV-­ positive status is, in essence, to come clean about being unclean. I do not, however, use the phrase cast out to imply that people with HIV are systematically ostracized by all the people to whom they disclose their status. This would be an absurd claim, and it has not been my experience. Yet to confess is a way to open up and shut down at the same time, if only because the act of confession seeks to define each interlocutor as an autonomous individual distinct from the other, each one the protagonist of a different story. We have entered Foucauldian territory here, so it may prove useful to quote from The History of Sexuality. In the following passage, Foucault describes what he calls“the internal ruse of confession,” by which the dissemination of power in the modern era gives the erroneous impression that to speak the truth is intrinsically liberating while silence confines: The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature,“demands” only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence, truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a“political history of truth” would have to overturn but showing that truth is not by nature free—­ nor error servile—­ but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this. 120 Disclosure Thanks to its link with the modern democratic ideal of transparency,disclosure seems to pertain to the unimpeded circulation of information and thus takes on the aura of progress and freedom from authoritarian power. In reality, it replaces authoritarianism with authoritativeness, a form of power that Foucault tied to what he termed the will to knowledge. Now consider this: as of this writing, thirty-­ six states in the United States criminalize seropositivity in one way or another, mostly by making it a crime not to disclose one’s status in certain sexual situations or, in one-­ third of these states,by considering it an aggravating factor in other offenses. In some states, a conviction will be accompanied by placement on a sex offender registry—­sometimes for the rest of your life. This, in turn, mandates that you disclose your status as a sex offender every time, for example, that you look for housing and employment or move into a new neighborhood. Being thus sentenced to disclosure for life after an initial failure to disclose is so constraining that, the legal scholar J. J. Prescott has noted, it feels a lot like prison and ends up fostering secrecy rather than openness. Being HIV positive, once a death sentence, has become a life sentence, a never-­ ending work of policing. What’s particularly Kafkaesque about this is the fact that such a life sentence was made possible because of the virus’s simultaneous association with and dissociation from death. Lifelong disclosure may be the form of punishment that has replaced death, but the HIV positive, caught in a double bind, must be punished one way or another. In many ways, the inevitable physical death that HIV infection once signified in pretty much everyone’s mind has now been replaced by a vicious , pernicious...

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