AIDS and Its Metaphors Critics Flashcards
When was it published?
1989
The impact of AIDS?
The AIDS epidemic, which first emerged in the early 1980s, had a profound impact on public health, accounting for over half a million deaths in the United States alone, and at least 39 million universally between 1981 and 2012.
Criticism of the essay’s themes?
D. A. Miller criticised this book for not elaborating ‘homosexuality […] as a topic at all’, which he sees as avoiding the question
Prognosis of the disease?
Those diagnosed with AIDS in 1981 could expect to live approximately another six months
Her bisexual identity?
Richard Howard believed that she should have used her own experiences as a member of the gay and lesbian community to give her text more authority
Her opinion on metaphors?
She revealed in an interview with Jonathan Cott which was published in The Rolling Stone that ‘metaphors are central to thinking’ but can distort the ways that we think.
The AIDS body is dirty?
The AIDS body, is therefore characterised as morally and physically dirty, aligning with Andrea Dworkin’s comments about women’s bodies and their association with dirt, noting that ’the emersion of filth, including death by filth [or contamination’ is essential to women’s disempowerment
Her cancer diagnosis?
She wrote Illness and Its Metaphors after being diagnosed with cancer, and she only had a 10% chance of survival
The work to prevent AIDS?
Too little of the actual work to prevent AIDS was acknowledged in her book, Christopher Lehmann Haupt noted. Charles Perrow came to a similar conclusion
She addressed her own experience with AIDS?
That Sontag herself felt some pressure to bear witness by invoking her own personal experience is evident in her AIDS story “The Way We Live Now,” published four years after AIDS and Its Metaphors
The AIDS epidemic is fundamentally cultural?
Sarah Brophy - ‘its meanings created through language and visual representation’
