Practices of Freedom - C

Watney has dedicated the last eight years to HIV/AIDS activism. From hundreds of publications and lectures, he gathers the trenchant best of his reformist spirit in this collection of essays. Equally at home lecturing at Harvard or writing for Vanity Fair, Watney writes prose that is both theoretically based and accessible. AIDS, he asserts, is hidden behind stereotypes of the groups it supposedly defines, and, like these stereotypes, HIV and AIDS have become instruments for political power, control and neglect, evoking archaic fears and taboos. AIDS deaths are political deaths, Watney maintains, using both factual evidence and keen deconstruction informed by theoretical support from the likes of Michel Foucault. By forcing the consideration of sexual diversity, AIDS ``threatens the fragile stability of the most fundamental organizing categories for both individual and collective identities.'' HIV/AIDS, then, becomes more than physically symptomatic; it reveals how society conceives of otherness and considers those afflicted with HIV/AIDS as not only less important but fit to die. By turns angry and tender, Watney's is an important and timely book, which suffers, in spite of all its merit, from a certain repetitiveness. And Watney's family-bashing is an excessive reaction to the conservative emphasis on ``family values,'' to which he should have given more careful consideration. (Nov.)