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148 Disclosure Where’sthePoliceWhenYouNeed’Em? Why should I miss the identity categories performed into existence by the act of coming out? Surely not just out of campy fascination with obsolete forms and genres. Early AIDS theorists had read their Foucault. We know Foucault’s critique of confession. We also know of Rancière’s definition of the police as what produces and enforces radical distinctions for the purpose of creating inequality and social control. And we are quite aware that the genres on which the HIV disclosure piggybacks have often been used historically to police people and assign them fixed places within and without a disciplined social order. Indeed, these genres represent something like the concrete enforcers of a series of interrelated discourses (in the Foucauldian sense): religion, medicine, law.Again, coming out is a never-­ending process of repetition: as it repeats certain genres, it repeats with them the power structures they were conceived to sustain. Think, for example, of the disciplinary power of the mandatory disclosure to previous and future sexual partners. The HIV-­positive person must speak out so that the virus may stay in. To keep it all in would be to risk contaminating others. This is why forced disclosure, when all is said and done, represents a form of enclosure. So why do I, as a gay man living with HIV, seem to long for the social categories that, as an intellectual, I have been criticizing as oppressive and debunking as untenable in the first place? The short answer is: because it is difficult not to be anything. Clearly, silence, while tactically useful in certain situations, cannot offer an acceptable political option in the long run, even as a form of resistance against legal and public health mandates. The AIDS pandemic is still tied to social inequalities and injustice.Silence still equals death in the end.Conversely , to attempt to reinstate the old identity categories—­or to invent new ones, for that matter—­ cannot constitute a viable political endeavor either. The potential of disclosure to outline concrete modes of equal social relations may thus be found instead in its dynamics rather than in its outcome. What if, in other words, the politics of disclosure was a matter of utterance? An utterance is a complex linguistic act made up of different elements and of how they relate to each other: a statement,interlocutors,and circumstances of time and place. As such, then, utterance cannot be isolated as a stable object of empirical knowledge, and, the linguist Emile Benveniste has taught us, it can never be reproduced. The HIV disclosure, understood as utterance, must constantly recur but, unlike the statement“I’m HIV posi- Disclosure 149 tive,” never à l’identique. For instance, I first presented working versions of this section in front of audiences. At this point in the presentations, it was the third time that I had made the same statement since the opening sentence of my talk, and each time the utterance was different, either because I simply made the statement at three different points in time (it was no longer a disclosure after the first utterance) or, not so simply, because I used it in hopes of creating different effects in the recipients in relation to a specific stage in my argument. This iterative dimension of the HIV disclosure is thus the sign of a perpetual reinvention of social relations—­ relations between interlocutors, between interlocutors and statement, between interlocutors , statement, and situation, and so on. Understanding disclosure as utterance, then, means that none of the elements involved in the process—­ people, statements, situations, and beyond—­ may stand still long enough to be captured, that is, to constitute, or be constituted as, steady categories. In fact, categories find themselves undone in favor of endless dynamics. To a large extent, I believe this also works in the case of a written disclosure such as this one. Like many others, I have disclosed my HIV status, or opted not to disclose it, for various reasons and with different, often crisscrossing motivations .Most will sound familiar to anyone who has come into contact with the facts of HIV disclosure. Issues of transmission, sexual safety, and other health-­ related matters always arise. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, I was either looking for emotional support or alleviating stress, as speaking out can do. Often, the goal was the preservation of a preexisting relationship that could have suffered from a lack of openness. Or from an excess of it. But creating...

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