What Race Is Your Disease? Africanizing “Dirt”

Abstract

In her work on race, gender, and sexuality in the European colonial project, postcolonial theorist Anne McClintock lays out the co-constitutive nature of systems of oppression: “[R]ace, gender, and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways.”² This then begs the following questions when doing any contextual analysis: How are class and gender implicated in the construction of the understandings of race, particularly but not exclusively, in this case, “blackness” and “whiteness”? How are gender and race implicated in the construction of the understandings of labor and class? How are class and race implicated in the construction of the understandings of gender, particularly masculinity and femininity? It also begs the analysis of power in all social classifications of differentiation, especially in terms of and through the lenses of imperial and colonial interests. The co-constitution of interlocking and multiplying systems of domination and marginalization has many implications.

Just as the figure of “the prostitute” is habitually regarded as a source rather than a victim of disease, so we may trace on the pattern of displacements which offer us a carnal Africa as the “source” of AIDS, transported home to the bosom of the white Western family via the “monstrous passions” of “perverts” and “the promiscuous.” ¹