"AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them"
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Sontag is doing what she always does best: pulling the cultural mask off a medical fact. AIDS, she suggests, didn’t become an epoch-defining terror only because of its epidemiology, but because it arrived as a story privileged societies were already primed to tell about themselves. The disease swelled in “our awareness” as metaphor: a drama of contamination, punishment, and suddenly porous borders. The word “taken” is the tell. Meaning isn’t inherent; it’s assigned, circulated, weaponized.
Her phrase “privileged populations” sharpens the target. This isn’t empathy at the center; it’s anxiety management. AIDS becomes a screen onto which the comfortable project their favorite apocalypses: loss of control, moral disorder, foreignness, sexual unruliness, the fear that the protections of class and nation won’t hold. “The very model” is slyly clinical, as if catastrophe were a template you could photocopy. That’s Sontag’s irony: the panic is methodical, almost bureaucratic, less a spontaneous horror than a rehearsed one.
The context is late-20th-century America and Europe, where AIDS was initially framed as a problem of “others” (gay men, Haitians, drug users) until it threatened to become everyone’s problem. Sontag diagnoses how quickly privileged fear turns symbolic, and how symbolism turns political: into stigma, into neglect, into a moralizing public discourse that delays care while inflating dread. She isn’t minimizing catastrophe; she’s indicting the cultural machinery that decides which suffering becomes a spectacle and which remains invisible.
Her phrase “privileged populations” sharpens the target. This isn’t empathy at the center; it’s anxiety management. AIDS becomes a screen onto which the comfortable project their favorite apocalypses: loss of control, moral disorder, foreignness, sexual unruliness, the fear that the protections of class and nation won’t hold. “The very model” is slyly clinical, as if catastrophe were a template you could photocopy. That’s Sontag’s irony: the panic is methodical, almost bureaucratic, less a spontaneous horror than a rehearsed one.
The context is late-20th-century America and Europe, where AIDS was initially framed as a problem of “others” (gay men, Haitians, drug users) until it threatened to become everyone’s problem. Sontag diagnoses how quickly privileged fear turns symbolic, and how symbolism turns political: into stigma, into neglect, into a moralizing public discourse that delays care while inflating dread. She isn’t minimizing catastrophe; she’s indicting the cultural machinery that decides which suffering becomes a spectacle and which remains invisible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Susan Sontag, 'AIDS and Its Metaphors' (essay orig. New York Review of Books 1988; expanded as book, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1989). |
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