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  • Negative:Using Performative Interventions to Explore HIV-Negativity
  • Ragan Fox (bio)

In fall 2004, I took a graduate course called "Performance and Social Activism" at Arizona State University. As a class, we considered various approaches to scholarship, activism, and performance, noting the ways in which the social worlds overlap. Several times throughout the semester, we were given opportunities to workshop short performances of activism. The workshops provided an opportunity for me to perform, gain feedback, and revise fictive monologues that I had been working on throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, we were asked to present a final project that used performance to highlight a particular activist agenda. I chose to focus on significations of HIV-negativity, because I wanted to acknowledge my HIV-related fears and work through them in a self-reflexive manner. For the final project, I wrote and performed Negative, a short performance piece comprising three HIV-negative–related monologues. Each of the three monologues challenges the idea that HIV-negativity is necessarily a positive or affirming experience. The title flips the connotation of "negative" back to a condition of attitudinal negativity. Later that year, I performed a full-length version of Negative in Arizona State University's Empty Space Theater. The audience for this performance was composed of people who were in the class, along with some of their friends. In the following pages, I critically consider the activist potential of the monologues. Before doing so, it is important to contextualize the roles of performance, theory, and activism in HIV-related scholarship.

The Activist Potential of a "Performative Intervention"

In his book Acts of Intervention,David Román intimates that our culture's woefully partial knowledge of "being negative" contributes to increasing seroconversion1 rates (233), and, conversely, an outright rejection of sex by individuals who fear contracting HIV (243). Although fewer people are dying of AIDS-opportunistic infections, HIV and AIDS diagnoses are substantially increasing (Krisberg 6; Sanchez A3). Rising seroconversion rates indicate that current HIV-prevention tactics are not as effective as they ought to be. New ways of framing and talking about the virus are therefore needed to complement existing efforts to contain its spread. In this essay, I, an HIV-negative performance artist and academic activist, chronicle my attempt to intervene against popular AIDS myths by exploring HIV-negativity. "Interventions" are performances that add to, contradict, and / or renegotiate how HIV and AIDS are articulated in US American culture, with the intent of calling dominant ideologies into question (Román 43). My mode of intervention involves the use of creative writing and solo performance. I chronicle the successes and failures of my intervention in [End Page 47] the form of this academic essay because such documentation illuminates the often thorny ground of performance work. Ultimately, I question how narrative and creative writing might be used to flesh out HIV-negativity, providing multiple opportunities for audience insight and identification.

In this essay, I examine how a variety of discourses affects identity formation; I also look at the ways in which performance contributes to, challenges, and sometimes reifies popular discursive handlings of HIV-negative people. To accomplish these tasks, I borrow from and modify Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity. In Bodies that Matter, Butler explains that "performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate 'act,' but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (2). As with gender, serostatus can be framed as a key identity marker that depends on an iterative chain to constitute itself. Using performance to establish an HIV-negative identificatory continuum—in terms of topics that specifically relate to HIV-negative cultural members—performatively intervenes in discursive handlings of HIV that tend to ignore people who are affected by AIDS but who are not necessarily infected.

By employing the term "performative intervention," I am advocating for a mode of performance that is explicitly activist / interventionist, tactically employed, and capable of challenging monolithic and oppressive conceptions of complex social phenomena. While some could argue that every performative utterance presupposes a response from its witnesses, the type of intervention that I imagine occurs when the terms...

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