Abstract
The paper approaches Christopher Coe’s Such Times as an act of queering the dominant medical discourse, making it less authoritative but more inclusive and democratic, and at the same time not allowing one to equate living with a (life-threatening) virus with dying. The peculiar approach to AIDS in this novel stems from its treatment of the syndrome as nothing else but the product of life itself. The strategy of domesticating HIV is underscored in the book through establishing a parallel of food being consumed, digested and then absorbed by the body, to the transmission of the virus into the host’s body. As a result, a human being appears to be in an incessant process of mutation with both sustenance and pathogens, for having “a pathogen within the body and becoming ill are entirely different matters” (Kōjin 1993: 106). The novel’s contribution to the deconstructive effort aimed at dismantling the oppressive system of social exclusion and stigmatization engendered by the centralized medical institutions is far from fully acknowledged or appreciated. In this analysis, the interpretative strategy takes as its departure point the exploration of the medical discourse as introduced and represented in Such Times, after which the attention is drawn to the theme that aims at counterbalancing the authoritative and dehumanizing medical discourse, which is the idiom of food celebration. As it is argued in this paper, the food metaphor could provide a parallel for understanding, and domesticating, the virus along the lines of consumption and sustenance, or intake and replication.
Presenters
Krystian Marcin GradzAssociate Professor, Institute of Literature and New Media, Szczecin University, Poland
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus–Making Sense from Taste: Quality, Context, Community
KEYWORDS
Food, Health, Illness, Disease, Medicine, Celebration, Death, Virus, Sociality
