The Comings and Goings of the Infectious Tourist

Abstract

Again and again during the first decade of the crisis, a question arose, a nightmarish echo: What is AIDS? Where does it come from? Who carries it? Strictly speaking, this is not one but three different questions, but attempts to answer them always converged in an effort to identify a single origin. Solving this mystery was a society-wide obsession: behind the inquiries lurked a conviction that the origin of the crisis held the key to resolving it and that a precise answer could offer an equally precise solution. Establishing an origin became a highly contentious affair. Official statements in the West immediately assigned responsibility to foreigners of all stripes—economic immigrants, political exiles, homosexual tourists, and more than one flight attendant—but there were other versions of the story, too, scientific ones that, though they did not yet understand the syndrome, nevertheless obsessively strove to map its routes of contagion, tracing it back to the point of origin. The early theories were quickly refuted. HIV-positive writing would also devote ink to the problem, taking it on as a necessary challenge, sometimes confirming certain discourses but at others, in the most remarkable cases, subverting and complicating the map of the epidemic to transform established notions about the virus.