Feeling Entitled: HIV, Entitlement Feelings and Citizenship

Abstract

We live with a sense of being continually immersed in, even assailed by, publically performed emotions. Popular commentators and social theorists compete in dating this tendency to a variety of beginnings — enlightenment individualism; liberal humanism; discourses of the self in the late nineteenth century and onward; postwar mass mediatising of the emotions; the postmodern relativising of representation; the late-modern breakdown in social and political organisation or the globalising of emotional and other economies (Baudrillard, 1995; Bauman, 2000; Craib, 1994; Furedi, 2004; Giddens, 1991; Himmelfarb, 1996; Lasch, 1991; Lyotard, 1984; Maclntyre, 1984). These explanatory trajectories often value their endpoint negatively, as the banalisation and even the destruction of the public realm; or occasionally, positively, as indicating an expansion, even a démocratisation, of culture. In this chapter, I want to look not at the value of the public culture of feelings or where it comes from, but at the social consequences of one particular public feeling, that of entitlement, when it is expressed in public and quasi-public contexts by or on behalf of a particular social group: people in the UK who define themselves as HIV positive.¹ I am going to argue that this public feeling does indeed have ‘positive’ consequences: it tends to promote a kind of HIV citizenship within a frame of social inclusion and at times, social justice.²