Visualizing the AIDS pandemic: subjectivity and intimacy in the documentary gaze

What does it mean to be a political subject in a time of pandemic disease? This

question haunts contemporary cultural politics, from the threat of bioterrorism to the
prospect of avian and swine flu. But like many geographies of globalization, the `every-
where' and `everyone' implicit in popular understandings of pandemic disease prove to
be spatially and socially complex. Framing HIV infection as a global phenomenon
requires making sense of the complex spatial differentiations of contemporary global-
ization and the colonial legacies from which it emerges (Agyei-Mensah, 2006; Altman,
1999; Barrett, 2007; Comaroff, 2007; Craddock, 2000; Dyson, 2003; Farmer, 2003;
Yeboah, 2007).
In the United States an important line of activist engagement has focused on
making visible the conditions of inequality that fuel disproportionate rates of HIV
infection in particular places and populations (Smith and Siplon, 2006). Contemporary
media projects owe a significant debt to earlier forms of visual activism, particularly
the documentary practices associated with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
(ACT UP). As video activist Gregg Bordowitz (2004) explains, ``the videos I worked
on collectively with so many others ... were skilled constructions intended to incite
people to action'' (page 233). AIDS video activism provided a powerful challenge to
hegemonic constructions of people living with AIDS and to the presumptive passivity
of media audiences.
This paper examines two documentaries produced nearly twenty years after activists
began to employ cameras to change the politics of HIV/AIDS. Although these films do
not share the inventive interplay between formal strategies and narrative content or the
DIY, `seize the means of production' radicalism of AIDS video activism, they might be
thought of as exemplars of a visual culture AIDS video activists helped to create.
The queer intimacy of global vision: documentary practice
and the AIDS pandemic
Meredith Raimondo
Comparative American Studies, 10 N. Professor Street, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA;
e-mail: meredith.raimondo@oberlin.edu
Received 31 January 2008; in revised form 29 April 2009
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 112 ^ 127
Abstract. This paper examines the visual and narrative geographies of AIDS in the documentaries
Pandemic and A Closer Walk (both of which came out in 2003). Each film offers a travelogue of diverse
sites affected by HIV/AIDS in order to politicize viewers' understanding of their place in the global
pandemic, seeking to remake the spatial subjectivities that support a dangerously disinterested status
quo that allows preventable illness and death to occur. In exploring the spatial politics of mass-
mediated subject formation through these conventionally accessible documentaries, I argue that
each film hopes to offer what I will call a `queer optic' on global AIDS, enabling viewers to look
critically at the structures of inequality that normalize preventable suffering. By challenging normative
ways of looking at AIDS, these documentaries seek to produce visual intimacies with the hope of
diminishing the distinterest of distance. However, neither film is able to realize its boldest ambitions.
While recognizing their strong commitment to greater justice for people living with HIV/AIDS,
I argue that each film employs narrative and visual strategies that ultimately limit their efficacy as
political projects. In various ways, they struggle with and in substantive ways fail to dislodge colonial
narratives and optics. By examining their projects through a theoretical framework influenced by
early AIDS video activism, I demonstrate the importance of identifying visual strategies that resist
neoimperial logics that too often shape the representation of spatial Others.
doi:10.1068/d1108
Pandemic, which was first broadcast in the United States in 2003 on the HBO network,
and A Closer Walk, which circulated in film festivals and theaters beginning in 2003
before making its US television debut on PBS in 2006, seek to politicize viewers' under-
standing of global AIDS.
(1)
Using conventional documentary forms to reach broad
audiences, both films offer a travelogue of diverse sites affected by HIV/AIDS in order
to remake the spatial relations that undergird a disinterested status quo. In their political
commitments they illustrate some of the ways in which better capitalized and institu-
tionalized mass media have taken up the challenges posed by AIDS activists, but also
how such productions may fail to realize the radical ambitions of earlier visual activisms.
These documentaries also provide an opportunity to consider the spatial politics of
mass-mediated subject formation. Each film hopes to offer what I will call a queer
optic on global AIDS, enabling viewers to look critically at the structures of inequality
that normalize preventable suffering. This optic is significantly spatial. Both Pandemic
and A Closer Walk use the mobility of the camera to resituate the normative viewer,
constructed as spatially and affectively insulated from the impact of AIDS, within the
pandemic. Carter and McCormack suggest the importance of ``pay[ing] particular
attention to the way in which film articulates the affective relations within, between
and beyond bodies'' (2006, page 235). These documentaries produce visual intimacies
with the hope of diminishing the disinterest of distance.
Neither film is able to realize its boldest ambitions, offering a lens that proves to be
not so very queer. While I recognize their strong commitment to greater justice for
people living with HIV/AIDS, I argue that each film employs narrative and visual
strategies that ultimately limit their efficacy as political projects. While they may
succeed in making the case that HIV/AIDS is best understood globally, they accom-
plish this scale jump by reinforcing the very hierarchies of power they seek to trouble.
In various ways, each film struggles with and in substantive ways fails to dislodge
colonial narratives and optics.
Queer spatial analysis has the potential to offer insight into the possibilities and
perils of producing intimacy through visual representations. Visual representations
are also an important site to consider the barriers to producing the kinds of queer
intimacies that might enable and sustain new forms of activist community. The failure
of these documentaries to produce a queer optic illuminates the ways in which the
relationship of vision and desire, subjectivity and distance, continue to represent an
important site of political intervention.
A queer optic? The challenges of seeing `other' places
Mainstream documentary film may seem a focus considerably less urgent than the
embodied experiences of people living with AIDS or the work of community orga-
nizers seeking to meet needs and ameliorate inequalities. However, cultural critic Cindy
Patton (2002) argued against any quick dismissal of mediated forms of engagement
with the AIDS pandemic:
``Non-face-to-face spaces are extremely important elements of reality, for activists, for
researchers, and for people living with HIV. To acknowledge only local knowledge
suggests that we cannot understand any situation we have not directly experienced
and ignores the role of other registers of experience in helping us conceptualize,
interpret and realize our particular situation'' (page xx).
Patton's call to consider the role of ``non-face-to-face spaces'' suggests the potentially
important role films like Pandemic and A Closer Walk can play in mobilizing political
(1)
See Pandemic and A Closer Walk websites (http://www.pandemicfacingaids.org/en/indexFla-
sh.adp, http://www.pbs.org/previews.closerwalk/).
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 113
subjectivities. In taking up this question, I am also responding to Clive Barnett's (2004)
interest in ``moving beyond a disciplinary privilege accorded to `real spaces' as the
paradigm of public space, and analyzing communications media as mediums for the spa-
tial and temporal articulation of different forms of social practice, oriented towards
different rationalities, and stretched out across different territorial scales'' (page 202).
Why approach the issues of scale and distance through the problematic of queer
optics, when neither film uses this concept to define its project? I used it here to draw
attention to the ways in which visual texts produce politicized ways of seeing and
feeling. In Zero Patience (1993), for example, John Greyson used the form of the movie
musical to expose the spectacularization of gay male sexuality in the ``Patient Zero''
narrative, which placed the blame for the North American epidemic on the dangerous
sexual appetite of one Canadian flight attendant (Crimp, 1997). Greyson's film, which
re-presented the character he calls ``Zero'' as both an object and subject of desire,
suggests the ways in which a queer optic might describe a relationship between a visual
text and its audience. Queer optics illuminate political possibilities and mobilize
engagement. As Bordowitz reflects, ``the idea that truth is a field of contestation gave
us more than a tactical approach to our activism: it gave us hope'' (page 252). A queer
optic disrupts `truths' that support a deadly status quo in order to expose the possibili-
ties for survival and transformation. Examining optics draws attention to both what
and how we see, understanding that these domains play a key role in subject forma-
tion. If visual texts both produce and trouble subject ^ object relations, they might
workor work againstqueer ways of seeing.
I use `queer' here to indicate a critical modality focused on the politics of norma-
tivity. My analysis draws substantially from queer-of-color scholarship concerned with
the production of political subjectivities organized in resistance to the simultaneous
operations of heteronormativity, racism, and colonialism (Ferguson, 2004; Gopinath,
2005; Manalansan, 2003; Mun oz, 1999). Geographers have also drawn attention to the
important role of spatiality in queer analysis; as Kath Browne (2006) explains, ``I (and
others) locate `queer' in the radical requirement to question normativities and ortho-
doxies, in part now by rendering categories of sexualities, genders and spaces fluid''
(pages 885 ^ 886). Larry Knopp (2006) argues that ``queer geographies have been de-
constructive and critical, and suspicious of certainties, universal truths, and ontological
imaginations about the way the world works that are mechanistic or instrumental''
(page 48). Michael Brown's work on the political geographies of sexual citizenship
suggests that sexuality as focus of analysis is one important though not exclusive
concern of ``more critical, or queer, ways of looking'' (2006, page 875).
While I do not limit my discussion of queer optics to the ways in which visual texts
represent gender and sexuality, these domains are certainly one important site to
evaluate these documentaries. Too often, uninterrogated sexual and gender normativi-
ties undermine their attempts to dislodge privileged ways of seeing. For this reading I
am indebted to transnational feminist and queer scholars who raise important cautions
about the preoccupation with oppressed Others. Chandra Mohanty (2006) sketched the
relationship of academic feminism to the project of US empire, noting the importance
of ``challenging the rescue narrative of privileged US feminists'' which situates women of
color in other countries as prisoners of an abject patriarchy who desire liberation into
Western neoliberalism (page 17). Recent US feminist concern with women in Afghanistan
provides a particularly powerful example of the persistence of Orientalist and other
imperialist discourses in models of global gender inequality (Cohler, 2006; Russo, 2006),
but as debates about sex work and trafficking demonstrate, this debate is hardly new
(Desyllas, 2007; Doezema, 2001).
114 M Raimondo
The production of subjectivity in the context of militarized nationalisms and global
rights work has emerged as a key concern in transnational scholarship, and provides
some important reminders about the political terrain visual representations must
navigate. For example, Jasbir Puar (2007) argues that US gay identity is increasingly
placed in contradistinction not to heteronormative patriotism but to the repressed and
dangerous queerness of the terrorist, creating a political landscape in which certain
kinds of rights claims may function to reinforce forms of state violence towards
sexualized and racialized Others. Her analysis suggests that the importance of asking
how these English-language documentaries about HIV/AIDS, speaking through US
celebrity narrators to US audiences, produce narratives about spatial differences by
mapping `oppressive' gender norms.
Like debates about the status of women, the globalization of Western forms of gay
identity has sometimes produced political frames which stigmatize forms of gender,
sexuality, sociality, and political mobilization that differ from normative white,
gender-normative, economically privileged US and European models (Oswin, 2006).
For example, ethnographer He ctor Carillo (2002) argues that the globalization of
US-based HIV-prevention models based in a cognitive and contractual approach to
safer sex disadvantaged and even disciplined Mexican sexual subjects who valued
spontaneous and embodied forms of sexual communication not clearly bounded by
US-style identity categories. This scholarship suggests that the importance of considering
the ways in which Pandemic and ACloser Walk make cross-cultural comparisons, which
may impose norms on `other' places rather than challenge US viewers to understand
the limitations of their own ways of knowing what gender and sexuality mean.
As the previous examples suggest, attention to the production of normativity calls
for an analysis of form as well as content. Feminist and queer criticism examines the
ways in which the desiring subjectincluding the subject who desires to seemay
both rely on and trouble colonial and neocolonial hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality,
and geography. Visual subjectivity has been an important site for the examination of
desire and power, especially the well-known debates that followed Laura Mulvey's
(1989) work on the female gaze (Jones, 2003; Kaplan, 2000). Scholars of documentaries
link desire both to the politics of truth claims and to the construction of the real.
``Television texts ... are a site of pleasure and meaning, which audiences actively exploit
to forge their experiences and, therefore, identities'', argues Bjo rn Bollho fer (2007,
page 174). For this reason, Michael Renov argues that ``knowledge and desire are
ineluctably entwined'' (2004, page 98). Bill Nichol, Catherine Needham, and Christian
Hansen (1991), contend that the relationship between knowledge and desire becomes
particularly clear in the juxtaposition of pornography and ethnographic documentary.
In these forms, ``pleasure and power entwine themselves around fulfillment and knowl-
edge'' (page 203). They argue that, although one foregrounds an erotics of `arousal' and
the other an erotics of `understanding', both ``rely on distance ... between subject
and object'' that ``allow[s] the spectator to dominate the Other vicariously without
openly acknowledging complicity with the very apparatus and tactics of domination''
(page 223). Of course, this characterization hardly does justice to the complexity of
either genre, acknowledging neither the reflexive turn in ethnographic film (Beattie,
2004) nor the political possibilities of pornography (one might point to safer sex
pornography by activists like Bordowitz to challenge the assumption of inevitable
domination). I cite their argument here because I think it does usefully draw attention
to the complex intersection of power, desire, and knowledge in visual subjectivity.
If normative forms of visual subjectivity are all too often linked to the domination of
the Other, a queer optic might produce new forms of visual intimacy by offering
alternative modes of seeing and relating.
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 115
Nichols et al (1991) suggest that the production of viewer subjectivity in documentary
film is fraught with power dynamics whose pleasures and satisfactions are spatial.
Indeed, distance is a figure frequently invoked by media scholars interested in space
and by geographers interested in visual culture. As Karen Beckman (2007) notes,
``the spatial and geopolitical dynamics of photography'' are centrally related to ``the
lens's uncanny ability to alter our conceptions of `distance' and `proximity by rendering
visible what the eye cannot see'' (page 62). Nichols et al politicize this point by
arguing that ``distance'' provides ``power ... the space across which it can operate
(and concomitantly display its ethics, politics, and ideology)'' (page 222).
Distance and intimacy come to operate as oppositional terms in the analysis of
visual subjectivity. To the extent that cameras create spatial relations between subjects
and objects, they also create affective relations. In an analysis of `media space,' Anita
Beressi (2004) identifies a complex range of affective states produced through the
mediated spatialities of televisual encounter:
``For those watching at home, audio-visual technology clearly offers a different
experience from that of being present at the pro-filmic event; offering a `modality'
of experience in which the viewer feels both powerful and disempowered, involved and
helpless. There is a real contrast here between the ordinary and the domestic and the
extraordinary and geographically distant'' (page 338).
The relationship of desire to place plays a central role in Ardis Cameron's (2002)
argument about filmic constructions of ``Othered places'': ``Topographies of strange-
ness overstuffed with desire and dread, othered places like these have long defined
a particular kind of rupture in American narratives of modernity and progress''
(page 412). Although Cameron is focused on representations of the United States, his
interest in the relationship of place to modernity might equally apply to narratives
about globalization, in which the landscapes of HIV/AIDS serve as ``Othered places''
failed by neoliberal capitalism. ``Attending to affect moves us to think about the
viscerally intense processes that provide the conditions of emergence of ideological
and/or discursive formations,'' note Carter and McCormack (2006, page 241). In other
words, distance and proximity in visual geographies are clearly related to the affective
domains of viewer subjectivity, to the intersections of feeling and meaning that shape
concerns, commitments, and mobilizations.
Distance is important not only in the theoretical literature on visual texts, but also
to the documentaries I discuss here. By remaking distanceand its affective domains
of disinterest and disengagementPandemic and A Closer Walk risk the camera's
potential to objectify in order to subjectify the viewer. In this sense, they aim to be
what Nichols et al (1991) describe as ``more radical ethnographies and pornographies''
that ``may propose alternative economies to the regulation of Otherness'' (page 203).
Feminist scholar Paula Rabinowitz (1994) imagines a similar kind of visual activist
in ``the documentary that seeks to intervene in history'' by ``mobiliz[ing] a subject of
agency. This subject clearly desires too, but the desire is directed toward the social and
political arenas of everyday experiences as well as world-historical events shaping those
lives'' (pages 23 ^ 24). Through such alternative forms of documentary, audiences
engage Otherness in order to remake, rather than simply reinforce, the relations of
power that shape the possibility of viewing. To the extent that such documentaries
arouse, they incite a desire for justice rather than domination.
Pandemic and A Closer Walk hope to offer this kind of transformative viewing
experience, but they struggle to create intimacy without resorting to forms of narra-
tive and visual colonialism. Their limitations suggest reasons to be cautious about
embracing spatial and visual intimacy as the necessary antidote to the objectifying
relations of distance. In these texts, the empowerment of viewers through visual
116 M Raimondo
mobility reinforces the spatial relations that produce the uneven geographies of
AIDS.
Global vision, individual stories: Pandemic: Facing AIDS
The first image in Rory Kennedy's Emmy-nominated Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2002)
is a view of the Earth from space. As a woodwind introduces the Philip Glass score,
titles alert the viewer to grim statistics on deaths from HIV/AIDS. The image shifts to
mid-range shots of unnamed people in diverse locations. ``In our world today, there
are forty million people living with HIV or AIDS'', reports actor Danny Glover, who
provides voice-over narration. ``Forty million different stories of hardship, pain, and
anger. But also of hope. Men and women, young and old, their tragedy is our tragedy.
And so are their stories.''
Pandemic provides, quite literally, a global view of AIDS. Each segment begins with
the rotating Earth, as titles provide the name and pertinent AIDS statistics for a
particular country. The camera zooms in at a swift but steady rate, revealing that the
continent coming into view is a composite image made of faces. As they grow larger,
the viewer discovers not homogenous national identity but a multicultural collage of
people from all the sites the film will eventually visit. As the tightening focus frames
the particular person featured in the segment, the image fades into an establishing shot
for the specific locale. Each partthe film eventually visits Uganda, Russia, India,
Thailand, and Braziloffers the story of an affected individual or community, providing
the viewer with insight into specific lives before the camera pulls away.
No segment takes place in the United States. It is certainly possible to read this
exclusion as a principled analysis of the US's relatively privileged status in the AIDS
pandemic and the hegemonic (if unevenly distributed) ignorance of places beyond US
national borders. Such an interpretation might understand the film's investment in
`other' places as an attempt to queer the relationship of self-interest and location,
suggesting that viewers might find their political interests best served by looking else-
where. What makes it hard to sustain such an analysis is the way in which Pandemic
naturalizes the mobility of global vision and the privileges of national citizenship.
The apparent dichotomy between global viewers and local narrative subjects should
not obscure the cues that position the film's imagined viewer in US national identity.
Both the use of a high-profile American actor as narrator and the visual mobility upon
which the film relies evoke a privileged form of citizenship unfettered by national
borders (and certainly unavailable to almost all of the people who appear in the film).
Freedom to look globally helps to locate the viewer as a national subject (McHugh,
2005).
Cameron (2000) argues that effective documentary draws attention to ``the ongoing
complicity of camera workits power to rob, to plunder, to produce, to shape, to
reveal, and to distort, to inspire'' (page 420). By these standards, the film stumbles
at its opening by positioning the American viewer in space, creating a scalar hierarchy
that reinforces the very inequalities it hopes to expose. Nor does the juxtaposition of
visual image with voice-over effectively destabilize the power relations that seem
inherent in this gaze. Documentary critic Stella Bruzzi (2006) argues that ``narration-
led documentaries ... even the least radical amongst them ... suggest that documentaries,
far from being able to represent the truth in an unadulterated way, can only do so
through interpretation'' (page 57). Pandemic sets up a potentially productive relation
between looking and listening, in which promise of transparency in the ``god's eye'' view
is juxtaposed with the need for explanation from the ``voice of god'' narrator (page 47).
But because both viewer and narrator occupy similarly disembodied and hypermobile
positions relative to the embodied and emplaced subjects of the film, the film undermines
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 117
the potential that people living with AIDS might offer their own interpretive authority.
Elite celebrity status thus functions as a form of idealized citizenship, a performance of
the citizen who cares, who is empowered to speak, and who is heard. In this way,
Pandemic's offer of a celebrity narrator as a site of identification may obscure the
mechanisms that make it hard for disenfranchised Americans, like disenfranchised
people elsewhere, to be heard. It is probably important that Glover is an African
American actor, although this aspect of identity is not explicitly addressed in the
film. Viewers who bring this extratextual knowledge to his narration may be invited
to imagine that his marked racial status suggests the potential of any disenfranchised
voice to become empowered to challenge the status quoan individualist promise that
in no way illuminates the structures that shape agency.
Individuals provide the scale through which Pandemic analyzes different forms of
HIV transmission, an approach that sometimes acknowledges but rarely explains the
role of structural inequality. In the India sequence, for example, the viewer meets
Nagaraj and Bhanu, an HIV positive couple anxiously awaiting the birth of their first
child. ``These prostitutes who stand by the road are very cheap'', explain Nagaraj as the
camera cuts between him and longer range images of sex workers. ``They flag us down
and stop the truck. Those five minutes of sexual desire seem more important than
AIDS.'' This personification of the eponymous truck driver of HIV transmission
narrates industrialization as a threat to marital monogamy, but provides no context
to explain its history in India or its relationship to the global economy. The American
viewer is not asked to situate himself or herself in an economic relationship to Nagaraj
and Bhanu, leaving open the potential of a neocolonial reading bemoaning the impact
of development on `primitive' places.
A similar limitation is evident in the Moscow sequence. Like Nagaraj and Bhanu,
Sergei and Lena individualize injecting drug use in Eastern Europe. The consequences
of their drug use are grave: Lena's mother ends up taking over the care of their child,
providing another illustration of Pandemic's thematic concern with sundered families.
The voice-over frames Sergei's difficulty in accessing effective treatment as a result of
an inadequate national health budget, but provides no analysis that might help the
viewer understand either why this problem exists or how it might be changed. Sergei's
misfortune is his location, which stands in contrast to Alex's experience with Brazil's
national antiretroviral program. ``If he were out of Brazil ... what hope would there be
for him?'' wonders Alex's doctor. The rapid shift from place to place suggests that such
differences merely exist rather than are produced. Sympathy and regret are the only
ways the viewer finds himself or herself implicated in this geographywhat might be
thought of as Pandemic's affective liberalism.
If testimonial narration by the film's narrative subjects provides some agency by
positioning them as authorities on AIDS, visual choices undermine Pandemic's efforts
to reframe the oppressive relations of visual and geographic Otherness. The close-up,
which Derek Bouse (2003) argues is a common documentary strategy to create inti-
macy, is one of the film's important tactics for rescaling AIDS. Close-ups cross the
boundaries of interpersonal space to provide intimate views of faces and bodies during
emotional and physical trauma. Emily Davis (2006) argues that in television programs
and films thematically engaged with globalization, ``questions of power and agency are
dramatized through struggles around bodily integrity'' (page 66). Pandemic's camera
closes in to show the viewer evidence of HIV's undoing of bodily integrity, but also
participates in that undoing through its own penetrating effects.
Medical intimacies abound in the stories of Pandemic's subjects; indeed, the
film labors hard to create them. The camera focuses closely on Alex's effort to
swallow his medication, revealing the working of his throat as he fights back nausea.
118 M Raimondo
Bhanu's childbirth story provides one of the most spectacular examples of visual
intimacy with the medicalized body. The camera gazes down at her as she lies on a
gurney with a cloth band over her eyes and positions itself at her feet to peer into the
incision from which the doctors draw her baby. The lack of subtitles in this sequence
(none is provided until Nagaraj, holding the child in the hallway, says ``It's a girl'')
reinforces the importance of the visual. In Thailand the camera gazes into the open
coffin of a young woman named Lek, drawing close as her cloth-wrapped body is
placed inside. The power relations of such visual intimacies are difficult to evade.
The camera's gaze diminishes distance through a relentless process of exposure that
reinforces the viewer's privilege.
Pandemic engages geographic difference in the hopes of overcoming it, promoting
the viewer's affective identification with the individuals it profiles. Two universal-
izing tropes appear again and again to underscore the humanity of its subjects:
hope and family. Indeed, these two concerns prove to be significantly intertwined.
AIDS threatens families and thus destroys hope; hope for survival is connected to
social acceptance in families. This dynamic is especially explicit in the Uganda
sequence, which focuses on the work of HIV educators Margaret and Apollo with a
group of married couples who seek HIV testing.
The testing room is another intimate space to which the viewer gains access
through the camera. It focuses on vials and test kits as a technician explains the
reactions in process, an intimacy with blood rendered safe by the mediated distance
of the documentary gaze. As an HIV counselor delivers the results, a low camera angle
places the viewer in an intimate relationship with the narrative subjects, especially
when it draws in for a close-up. ``Few who test positive can afford treatment'', Glover
reports. ``What they gain is the knowledge of their status.'' This statement is followed
with a counseling session with a positive couple, a poignant interaction in which the
woman reports no history of extramarital sexual contact: ``It is his fault, and there is
nothing that can be done.'' The economic issues raised by the voice-over have no
apparent connection to the interpersonal challenges in intimate relationships.
Pandemic presents family as a universal social form threatened by AIDS, an affec-
tive rather than a material tragedy. Orphans are figures of tragic need, for example, but
the dismantling of social welfare benefits that puts pressures on family are largely
invisible. The gender relations that shape heterosexual decision making about safer
sex are presented as an individual challenge for men and women who succeed or fail
to follow the global common sense about HIV transmission. HIV-positive Nagaraj
laments but ultimately submits to seronegative Bhanu's demand that they resume
sexual relations in order to have a baby. Although their doctor explains the association
of full social subjectivity with motherhood, Nagaraj's juxtaposed confession that he
feels like he's murdering Bhanu undermines the possibility of a sympathetic under-
standing of geographically specific constructions of gender and sexuality that may
shape relative assessments of risk. Lek, who personifies the Thai sex worker, survives
rape at twelve, is abandoned by her husband, and engages in sex work in order to send
money to her estranged parents in support of her son. Although she is later reconciled
with them, her narrative ends with illness, pain, and grief. Pandemic provides no
representation of women's sexualities in relation to anything other than exploitation,
reproduction, or infection. In this sense, heterosexuality does not represent a form of
universal identification, but rather a symptom of oppressive geographies elsewhere.
The only discussion of non-heteronormative sexualities emerges in the sequence
about Alex, a Brazilian college student who identifies as gay. It is possible to interpret
this choice as an attempt to challenge the assumption that AIDS is a `gay' disease and
to draw attention to the substantive impact of HIV/AIDS on heterosexual women.
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 119
The problem is that Alex bears the burden of representing a complex and highly
differentiated field of sexual diversity. Moreover, his story imposes a clear temporal
framework around sexuality. There is no evidence in the narrative that sexual behavior
is part of his present, consigned to a time before sickness when ``I was more wild.''
Instead, his sexual identity represents a threat to family unity: ``I know many gays
whose parents kick them out, which mine would never do. Now, the homosexuality,
I think it does bother them.'' ``I couldn't accept it'', his brother Carlos agrees. ``I never
accepted him. My mother never did either. ... I think when this happened to him, the
family became more unified.'' The willingness to provide care, to love even when
acceptance is not possible, provides a way to manage non-heteronormative sexualities
without disrupting the reliance on family as the primary structure for affection,
support, and care giving. Alex himself identifies its role in his survival: ``If I didn't
have a family, a mother, a father and a brother to worry about me, what would become
of me? I'd be in an AIDS shelter. Which, compared to the family I have, would be
horrible.'' While respecting Alex's individual experience, it is important to recognize
that Pandemic offers no example in which non-heteronormative socialites provide love,
caretaking, or support. By bracketing men who have sex with men within the culturally
specific rubric of gay identity, it fails to engage with any of the complex politics around
the globalization of sexual identity categories through AIDS discourse (Carillo, 2002). In
this sense, it erases the potentially illuminating framework of comparative geographical
analysis that its structure suggests.
Alex, like other people living with AIDS in Pandemic, is a liminal figure who
represents the prospect of social and biological death as well as the possibility of health
recovered and meaningful life restored. The camera's mobility offers the viewer expe-
riences of hope in a range of hopeless places, constructing an affective identification
with the humanity of struggling families. What it does not suggest is any way to
denaturalize the hopelessness of the geographies across which it travels. Thus, even as
Pandemic seeks to challenge the dehumanization of people living with AIDS, it rein-
forces the notion of unlivable geographies. Poverty is a clear theme, but there is no
suggestion that the viewer, located at some distance from such concerns for survival,
has anything to do with the perpetuation of inequalities. It is perhaps no accident that
Pandemic ends with a title reporting that Nagaraj and Bhanu's baby is HIV negative.
This final image of hope provides narrative closure to the anxieties about survival and
releases the viewer from further concern. Neither its geographies nor its affective
demands queer the dynamics that undergird the privileged viewer's distance from the
pandemic.
``Now you know'': A Closer Walk
Robert Bilheimer's A Closer Walk (2003) begins in Kempala, Uganda, as Dr Peter
Mugyenyi examines a dying child. ``So, what is her prognosis?'' asks an unidentified
member of the documentary crew. ``It's very poor indeed'', Mugyenyi answers gravely.
``I feel very sad to see a child come to this stage of the disease.'' As the music shifts
from the melancholy of Cole Porter's ``Every Time We Say Goodbye'' to the steady beat
of civil rights gospel anthem ``Will the Circle Be Unbroken'', the camera skips across
diverse locations and people. ``This is a story about the way the world is'', announces
voice-over narrator Glenn Close. ``AIDS in the world is a story about ourselves'',
adds conarrator Will Smith. ``What kind of people are we?'' Close wonders. ``How did
we come to this point?'' ``Where are we going?'' Smith asks, a metaphor of journey that
evokes the film's spatial concerns.
A Closer Walk shares a number of visual and narrative tropes with Pandemic. It
constructs the viewer as a traveling subject, touching down in locations as diverse as
120 M Raimondo
Uganda, South Africa, Ukraine, India, and Cambodia. Unlike Pandemic, it includes
an extended sequence in the United States, exploring the relationship between race,
gender, sexuality, and poverty in Kansas City. The viewer is thus defined not by his or
her distance from the most affected regions of the world but by social distance from
people affected by AIDS both at `home' and `away'. Like Pandemic, it provides two
kinds of narration: celebrity voice-over and individual testimony from activists,
experts, and people living with AIDS. Although the inclusion of global dignitaries
such as former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, activist rock star Bono, economist
Jeffrey Sachs, and the Dalai Lama might be seen to undermine the authority Pandemic
invests in people living with AIDS to speak of their experiences, the explicit questions
that frame the more didactic A Closer Walk hope to incite the viewer to produce a
openly critical analysis of the `the way the world is'.
A Closer Walk calls for individual involvement in meeting the challenges presented
by AIDS, but also maps the limits of individual agency as it demands a collective
response. The case of a Ugandan grandmother caring for a group of AIDS orphans
provides one clear exampleJoyce is both an `angel' and rendered vulnerable by her
poverty, made materially evident by the collapsing one-room house in which she and
the children live. They are often shot from below, an angle that emphasizes their strength
even in difficult conditions. ``What happens if I die?'' she wonders about her grand-
children via her translator. ``The world will care for them.'' A Closer Walk transforms
this statement into a call to action through the juxtaposition of noncommensurate
places. By moving from site to site, it hopes to produce a unified subject `the
world' out of local differences. In this sense, it calls for a geography of fundamental
human rights that envisions sameness in difference. For example, the next segment
takes place in Kansas City, in AIDS activist Roger Gooden's prosperous-seeming barn.
``How do I make sense here in Kansas City, and in the country here, how do I relate
to that child, that human being, in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, or in India, or in
Asia?'' he asks. ``You know, what's my relationship? Why are wewhat do we have
in common?'' This direct engagement with spatial and structural differencea white,
economically privileged man in the rural Midwest seems quite distant from the struggle
for survival in rural Ugandaleads Gooden to identify affect as the key to a human
rights framework: ``Well, I guarantee you we have the same pain. I guarantee you we
have some very same struggles for human rights and basic civil rights.'' A Closer Walk
envisions shared affective and political concerns across diverse geographic conditions.
Individual viewers are called to action as various documentary subjects reflect on
their understanding of what one person can do to make a difference. AIDS creates a
set of responsibilities that situates individuals spatially and relationally. For example,
Ugandan Reverend Gideon Bayamugisha embraces ``individual responsibility'' and
``community responsibility'' for ``safer sex'', but suggests that the ``global community
also has a responsibility to say well, since the communities have involvement, where are
the supplies? Where is the treatment? Where is the technical expertise?'' In the film's
representation of global AIDS, spatial distinctions provide a strategy to articulate the
obligations between differently located people: ``More and more, AIDS is dividing
the world between islands of wealth and vast of regions of poverty and despair.
But the isolation of the rich from the poor, the powerful from the weak, is an illusion'',
Close explains. Smith joins in, a clear illustration of the way A Closer Walk uses
dialogic voice-over to perform consensus: ``We can no longer hide, no longer separate
ourselves.'' Dr N N Samuel of Chennai, India, voices a similar sentiment: ``We cannot
isolate ourselves today and say this is their problem, this is not our problem ... With an
international commitment to this issue is the only way we can overcome some of the
injustice this disease is doing to people who are infected and affected.'' The indivisibility
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 121
of rightsincluding their spatial indivisibilityforms the core of ACloser Walk's vision
for change.
To make this argument, A Closer Walk shows the US viewer AIDS in other places.
Close-ups move the viewer towards unknown sites, but, as in Pandemic, this strategy
often works to reinforce privilege, unsettling public ^ private distinctions in ways that
reinforce objectification. In a section on injecting drug user in Ukraine, the camera
focuses tightly on the hands of a young man named Rouslan as he prepares to inject
himself. As he rolls down his sleeve, it zooms in on his face, leaving the viewer to meet
his heavy-lidded eyes. The documentary subject's direct return of the gazea visual
trope that appears often in A Closer Walkis clearly intended to engage the power
dynamics of looking. However, this scene evokes the melodrama of expose television
and thus does little to unsettle the power relations that enable the camera's visual
intimacies.
Affect provides one way to make sense of where this scene goes wrong. Writing
about filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell suggest the
potential of visual strategies to turn the objectification of the gaze back on the viewer:
``In a Foucauldian vein, Wiseman's camera seeks to allow contradictory practices
to trace out their own self-justificationseventually implicating themselves ... .
The portrayal of the banality of institutional life provides the context for a viewing
experience that leaves a distasteful residue in one's mouthas if we were privy to
a voyeuristic episode that stains us with a knowledge we might rather not possess''
(2003, page 300).
The ``knowledge that stains'' might be thought of as a productive alternative to the
forms of ``knowledge-power'' (Foucault 1990, page 98) on which the visual colonial
relationship relies. As Rousan looks back, the viewer might have been invited to
recognize that he or she was looking at the intimate moment without invitation or
consent. But, perhaps because the stakes are so high, A Closer Walk interrupts the
potential ambivalence of this scene with the soundtrack. A melancholy electric guitar
establishes the scene as one of despair and futility, reducing what might have been a
scene of subjects in encounter to a televisual spectacle that objectifies drug injection.
ACloser Walk works against a naturalized notion of geographic alterity by integrat-
ing the United States into its geography of human rights. Although the narration
frames the Ukraine sequence as an example of HIV transmission through injection
drug use in Eastern Europe, it transitions immediately to a sequence in Kansas City.
Smith explains, ``On the toughest street corners of America's cities, AIDS has found a
home among young African Americans, whose human and civil rights have long been
in jeopardy or denied. These young people are poor, marginalized, discriminated
against, and therefore especially vulnerable to the disease.'' This invocation of a
home for AIDS in the US points to a more complex global distribution of AIDS
than the one mapped by Pandemic. Such sequencesas with sequences focused on
the impact of AIDS on gay men in the United Statesdemonstrate that A Closer Walk
speaks to an American viewer whose insulation from AIDS is not merely a function of
national citizenship, but also of privileges of sexuality, race, and class. While this more
complex geography may seem a laudable shift, it does not enable A Closer Walk to
imagine people living with HIV/AIDS as part of its viewing audience. As Bordowitz
notes, ``people with AIDS and HIV infection are often invited to speak about some
of their experiences on television, but they are never pictured speaking to members of
the audience who may also be people living with AIDS and HIV'' (2004, page 80).
In this sense, both the complacency and potential agency that A Closer Walk attributes
to its imagined viewer may be predicated on a presumptive seronegativity.
122 M Raimondo
The human rights frame converges with colonialism mostly clearly in the section
that explores the relationship between HIV/AIDS and gender. As the camera moves
through mid-range shots of differently located women of color, Close reports, ``Of all
those vulnerable to AIDS in the world, none is more at risk than womenespecially
poor women.'' Smith adds, ``The life of a poor women or girl in the developing world is
a life upon which little or no value is placed.'' Despite this effort to acknowledge a
political economy of gender discrimination, the passive voice in Smith's elaboration
blurs responsibility for such valuations. The emphasis on the developing world rein-
forces the distance of such problems. ``In this setting,'' Smith explains, ``the relationship
of women to men is almost always dependent, inferior, and humiliating.'' The essenti-
alism of this statement creates a naturalization of gender hierarchies similar to the
representation of women in Pandemic, promoting a particular form of gender equality
as the only functional form of freedom for women. Ironically, the visual image that
accompanies this statementa young women spooning food onto the plate of an older
manmight be read in multiple ways, including as a moment of affectionate care
taking. Dismissing the possibility of meaningful and mutual relationships between
men and women in entire regions of the world is a blunt structural determinism that
reinforces Western imperialist logics. Although the visual examples of women facing
gender inequality include what appear to be women from the Eastern Europe footage
and expert discussion of African American women, the segment's extended example
has a very specific geography: ``Nowhere in the world are the forces that put women at
imminent risk of AIDS more powerful than in India.'' Much of the subsequent discus-
sion about AIDS in India focuses on the lack of resources, but a visit to a crowded
sanitarium brings the focus back to gender. ``When a woman or girl gets AIDS in
India'', Close tells the viewer, ``she is deemed to be worthless, a non-person.'' Again,
the use of the passive voice obscures agents in this analysis of power, suggesting that a
discriminatory and destructive gender hierarchy as a naturalized feature of place.
Women in the sanitarium look back at the camera but do not speak, their bodies offered
as mute evidence for the interpretations provided by the experts and voice-over narra-
tion. Unlike Bhanu in Pandemic, who claims her own reproductive priorities over the
logics of global HIV prevention, they have no voice. The voyeurism of the gaze remains
uninterrogated.
A Closer Walk treats geographical agency in a somewhat more complex way in a
sequence featuring Olivia Nantongo of Uganda. Olivia's story is an example of the
documentary's consistent focus on structural barriers to health and commitment to
recognize the agency of people with AIDS even under severe constraints. Orphaned at
twelve, Olivia appears not as the vulnerable child in need of rescue but rather an agent
who called the world to account through her work as a spokesperson (the film features
her trip to the White House, where she testified before several cabinet members and the
vice president). This example reverses at least temporarily the trajectories of mobility
that condition knowledge about AIDSrather than the mobile American documentary
subject traveling to `other' places in search of AIDS, the person with AIDS travels to the
US to challenge it to participate in the AIDS pandemic. This reversal, of course, is not
without its own politicsit suggests a continued investment in mobile subjectivities as
the most meaningful form of global empowerment without attending to the conditions
that enabled Olivia to travel, and risks constructing a heroic individualism that might
undermine the film's commitment to structural analysis. A Closer Walk manages this
problem by presenting this triumph as painfully short lived. Olivia's weeping American
sponsor explains that despite her accomplishments as a speaker and advocate, Olivia
found herself without access to treatment. Her sponsor ultimately bought drugs with
Documentary practice and the AIDS pandemic 123
her own money, but they arrived too late to save Olivia's life. Individual charity, in this
instance, is no solution.
If this segment offered narrative closure to Olivia's story, it might have worked
against the film's efforts to arouse viewers to action. After all, her death would seem to
leave no meaningful way to answer the needs of a very sympathetic individual with
whom the viewer has built an all-too-brief relationship. But just as A Closer Walk
wants to move across geographies in order to problematize distance, its engagement
with Olivia queers time (Halberstam, 2005). Although the story of her death appears
about halfway through the film, footage of a sweetly smiling Olivia is prominently
featured in its conclusion: ``What I would appeal to the whole world, I would say,
Come down to us and face reality. Face reality. Know what's going on in the lives of
other people ... . And I think we'll have a better world.'' As in earlier activist AIDS
films and videos, such temporal reimaginings work against linear time's logic of
inevitable death and emphasize the ongoing relationship of the living and the dead in
the effort to seek justice (Crimp, 2002; Juhasz, 1995; Mun oz, 1999). This queering of
time by reworking the sequence of life and death also remakes spatial subjectivities. As
Olivia finishes her final testimony, Ugandan expatriate Geoffrey Oryema's melancholy
song ``Nomad'' provides the documentary's final narration. While the viewer looks first
at individuals who return the gaze and then at people encountered over the course of
the film as titles provide updates on their status, Oryema sings, ``The other day I
looked at myself in the mirror, Do not hide your face, Do not hide your face from
me, When I feel sad.'' Who are the `me' and `you' in the mirror provided by A Closer
Walk? These final images seek to call the viewer into an awareness of positionality
rather than identification`we' are not the individuals pictured, but `we' have come
to recognize a relationship with them that demands action. ``I feel like a nomad'', the
song's refrain mourns, offering a problematized relation to place that works against
the false security that distance suggests. The nomad describes an experience of mobility
that demands recognition of the power dynamics that shape both location and disloca-
tion. By situating the trope of the nomad in a political economy of health inequalities,
A Closer Walk hopes to make visible the privilege of a mobile subjectivity than
hopscotches around the world in search of knowledge and challenge it to take respon-
sibility for the very global inequalities that construct its possibility. ``Now you know,
and now you can help'', the final title reads.
Scaling up subjectivity
``One thing this pandemic reveals is that everyone on the planet is interconnected
not always in ways that are clear and direct, but in ways that have medical and
political consequences that inexorably unfold ... . It is vital to disentangle some of
the strands of medical and spatial thinking that form the grid through which
interconnected global actors understand the situation faced here, now''
Cindy Patton (2002, page xxvi)
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, activist physicians Jim Yong
Kim and Paul Farmer suggest that there is new reason to be optimistic about a global
approach to the geographical inequalities of the AIDS pandemic: ``As vastly different
as these places may be, they are part of one world, and we believe that ambitious policy
goals, adequate funding, and knowledge about implementation can move us toward the
elusive goal of shared hope'' (page 645). Hopean affective stateis entwined with a
more just political economy as both its cause and product. Their argument is part of
a broader debate among public health professionals about the necessity of `scaling
up' AIDS prevention and treatment (Curran et al, 2005; Lamptey and Wilson, 2005;
124 M Raimondo
World Health Organization, 2007). Scaling up represents a policy strategy designed to
ameliorate the spatial differences that have transformed HIV infection from an acute
to a chronic disease in wealthier countries by investing resources to expand successful
interventions. The growing interest in such strategies prompted Kim and Farmer to
conclude that in contrast to bleaker periods in international AIDS policy, ``Today, the
global picture is quite different'' (2006, page 645).
While access to treatment may remain the most important measure of the `global
picture', I want to suggest that there may also be some value in taking this notion
somewhat more literally. Mass media can play an important role in confronting the
geographies of health inequalities, as Pandemic and A Closer Walk illustrate. They can
also have more troubling effects, helping to popularize narratives that naturalize
inequalities. Given these documentaries' concern with situating privileged Americans
in the global pandemic, they might be thought of as a mediated effort to scale up
viewer subjectivity. What concerns me here is not whether they succeed in shifting
scales. Rather, I have drawn attention to the manner in which they represent AIDS
as a global pandemic. The ways in which these films undermine their own efforts to
queer the power relations that sustain global inequalities also suggests the value of
geographic analysis for activist visual media. To the extent that media practices
engage space in the production of visual intimacies, spatial analysis holds important
tools for assessing whether the deployment of visual mobility to diminish distance
remakes or reinforces the spatial distinctions that shape political subjectivities. An
analysis of space may enable media makers to identify strategies to resist the reproduc-
tion of a neoimperial tourism that offers viewers affective pleasures that emerge from
all-too-familiar relations of objectification and domination.
Both Pandemic and A Closer Walk seek a way of seeing that engages the politics of
space and the structures of inequality that work through race, gender, class, sexuality,
nation, and other important axes of difference. Although they do not succeed in
realizing a queer optic, their claim of the global in the service of social justice rather
than as a modality of extracting the world's resources for the benefit of the privileged
represents an important opening. In demonstrating the relationship between object of
knowledge and optics of vision, these documentaries where they work and in how
they fail suggest possibilities for a radical queer geography. If `scaling up' is the next
step in combating HIV/AIDS, queer geography may offer critical tools for envisioning
a postcolonial, feminist, antiracist vision of `the world' that resists the logics of racism,
heteronormativity and empire.
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