Academic literature on the topic 'AIDS (Disease) AIDS (Disease) AIDS (Disease) Church work with the sick'

The notion that earlier medical interventions result in better patient outcomes is a widely held assumption in the medical community that is supported by extensive research. However, the decision to seek medical care in a timely manner is complex, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). A significant number of deaths in LMICs result from conditions for which effective treatments are available, such as high blood pressure. In Haiti, the greater life expectancy for women compared to men (67 vs. 62) may be par-tially explained by investments into maternal and reproductive services; however, several other factors are likely contributing to this difference. Given the limited research on men’s health and care-seeking behaviors in Haiti, this study was conducted to investigate the factors that influence men’s health-seeking behaviors and overall knowledge of health and disease. The long-term goal of this research is to identify, and implement, effective interventions that promote primary disease prevention by positively influencing the health-seeking behaviors of Haitian men in Jérémie and the Grand’Anse.
 MethodsThis study was a cross-sectional survey. A structured questionnaire was used to conduct 115 in-depth inter-views with Haitian men recruited from five churches of different denominations equidistant from Jérémie, Haiti. Questions investigated factors pertaining to socioeconomic status, church involvement, household composition, awareness of family and own health, health-seeking behaviors, and levels of knowledge of health and disease. Each participant had the opportunity to receive a blood pressure reading, and health education sessions were conducted at the conclusion of the study.
 ResultsMean age was 48 years, average household size was six, and 48% were married. Sixteen percent of men reported having multiple occupations, with 83% engaging in manual labor. Sixty seven percent reported being the primary decision-makers for health care. Sixty three percent had seen a health care provider in the last year; however, 70% had not sought care when sick due to cost (54%) or perceived severity (35%). Men reported they knew an average of 2.2 illnesses or diseases, with HIV/AIDs (30%) and cancer (30%) being the most common. Fifty eight percent of men thought disease and illness are preventable, and 9% believed early care was required for successful treatment. The preferred method of receiving health care information among men included health care provider (HCP) (33%), hospitals (26%), community health workers (22%), church (18%), and radio (18%). Sixty four percent had their blood pressure taken within the past year, and 32% were told that it was high. Only three of the 25 men, who were told their BP was high, reported HTN as a chronic (long-term) disease. Of the 115 men who received a BP measurement as part of the study, 28% had high blood pressure readings (>130/90).
 ConclusionMen in the community of rural Jérémie, Haiti, have limited knowledge of illness and disease, which may stem from insufficient resources being allocated to their health care. The cumulative effect of this may have negatively influenced their understanding of chronic, yet life-threatening, conditions such as high blood pressure. Consequently, a greater emphasis on health education and healthy lifestyle choices could have a substantial impact on not only primary prevention, but early detection and management of diseases as well. Therefore, in order to improve the health of both the men and their family members in this community, novel and targeted approaches to disseminate important health information to these men should be further investigated and readily implemented.

Kegiatan di Rumah Sakit mempunyai risiko berasal dari faktor fisik, kimia, biologi, ergonomi dan psikososial, variasi, ukuran, tipe dan kelengkapan Rumah Sakit menentukan tingkat risiko K3. RSD Gunung Jati sebagai sarana pelayanan kesehatan tempat berkumpulnya orang sakit maupun orang sehat yang memungkinkan terjadinya risiko timbulnya kecelakaan akibat kerja dan penyakit akibat kerja. Sumber bahaya yang ada di Rumah Sakit harus diidentifikasi dan dinilai untuk menentukan tingkat risiko, yang merupakan tolak ukur kemungkinan terjadinya kecelakaan akibat kerja dan penyakit akibat kerja. Dari hasil rekapitulasi insiden di ruang rawat inap Pangeran Suryanegara (Psikiatri) pada Desember 2015 sampai Juni 2017 terdapat 20 insiden. Tujuan penelitian ini untuk mengetahui manajemen risiko K3 menggunakan Hazard Identification Risk Assessment And Risk Control (HIRARC). Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kualitatif. Teknik yang digunakan dalam pengumpulan data yaitu observasi lapangan, telaah dokumen, dan wawancara mendalam. Analisis data diawali dengan mengidentifikasi bahaya potensial dengan metode HIRARC untuk menganalisa potensi bahaya dari aktivitas kerja serta memberikan penilaian risiko, dan melakukan upaya pengendalian risiko.Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, diketahui bahwa terdapat 10 aktivitas kerja di ruang rawat inap psikiatri yang memiliki potensi bahaya, identifikasi bahaya yaitu pencahayaan, disinfektan, tertular penyakit HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Tuberkulosis, postur tubuh yang salah, melakukan pekerjaan berulang, mendapat serangan pasien, sering kontak dengan pasien, panik, dan kerja berlebih. Penilaian risiko diketahui 1 aktivitas kerja dengan risiko extreme, 7 aktivitas kerja dengan risiko high, 1 aktivitas kerja moderate dan 1 aktivitas kerja low.Kata Kunci : Manajemen Risiko K3, HIRARC ABSTRACTActivities in hospital have a risk which comes from physical factor, chemistry, biology, ergonomics, and psychosocial, variety, size, type, and completeness of hospital determine the OHS risk degree. Regional Gunung Jati hospital as a health service facility is a gathering place for sick people or healthy people where it is possible a risk occurs due to working accidence and disease due to working. The dangerous source which exists in hospital must be identified and measured to determine the risk level which is measuring basis for the possibility of accidence occurs due to working and disease due to working. From the recapitulation result of incidence in overnight-patient room Pangeran Suryanegara (psychiatry) from Des 2015 to June 2017 has 20 incidences. The goal of this research is to know the OHS risk management uses HIRARC. This research is a qualitative research. The technique used to collect data is observing field, analyzing data begins by identifying the potential danger using HIRARC method, analyzing potential danger from working activities and risk measurement and do the effort for controlling the risk.According to the research's result, it is known that there are 10 working activities in overnight-psychiatry patient room which have potential danger, identifying danger such as lightning, desinfectan, infected HIV/Aids, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, wrong body from, doing repetitive work, getting patients attack, contacting patient frequently, panic, and workaholic. The risk measurement is known 1 working activity with the extreme risk, 7 working activities with high risk, 1 moderate working activity and 1 low working activity.Keywords : OHS Risk Management, HIRARC

The concept of families of choice was introduced almost three decades ago by Kath Weston (1997). She used it to describe the situation of the LGBTQ community in the era of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when the relations with families of origin had been heavily tested and proved to fail, whereas relations with friends were the primary source of care and support for the sick and dying, as well as their partners. Since then, contemporary non-heterosexual families are understood as their queer descendants and often the term “families of choice” is used synonymously. However, whereas much had been written about the ideologies of queer kinship, the sphere of the daily, ordinary, and often imperceptible practices of kinning, when nothing exceptional is happening (like a disease or family crisis) has still not been sufficiently examined. Therefore, it could be argued that the debate on queer kinship is rather conceptual and abstract with its focus on normativity/antinormativity (Wiegman and Wilson 2015), whereas the sphere of ordinariness and everydayness, where most of the queer kinning actually happens, is being neglected and marginalised in the discussion on queer kinship. In the paper, we explore this unmapped territory of queer kinship studies and specifically take a closer look at the material and everyday dimensions of kinship. To do so, we use the data gathered within the ethnographic research done within the Families of Choice in Poland-study (2013–2016, PI: Joanna Mizielińska). In this project, during thirty days of observation and several thematic interviews, done with twenty-one families, we were able to capture an in-depth picture of how the kinning practices are performed in daily life. In the paper we explore practices of silent intimacy (Jamieson 1998), focusing on food sharing practices among partners, but also between them and their families of origin that not always fully accept and support their relationship. In critical dialogue with Anglo- American scholarship on queer kinship, which built on and extends Weston’s classic work, we want to demonstrate that changing focus from its antinormative centrality towards embracing the ordinariness (Martin 1997) and everydayness of queer kinning, might not only contribute to developing the field, but also help us to understand the complexity of relational lives.

To Rodica, who died first / To Mircea, who continues me [I]In his book Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Sander L. Gilman argues that during the nineteenth century the healthy norm perceived as ugly not only those who were deformed, but also those who were ill, ageing, and/or experienced different bodily “loss of function” (53). In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. According to Deborah Lupton, “The new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion” (30). This essay focuses on the skin’s narrative as it presents its story when photographed. William Yang takes photos of his good friend, Allan, who is dying of AIDS. Of interests here is to discuss/approach the photographic art not from its scopophilic angle, that is, not from its perverse and pleasurable voyeuristic angle, but to analyze it side-by-side with Drew Leder’s notion of the “the remaining body.” He believes that in states of severe pain, one’s body “dys-appears,” “from the Greek prefix signifying ‘bad,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘ill,’” and he gives as example the English word “dysfunctional” (84). Yang’s photos offer variations of the “body that remains,” and, as we shall see, of the body that gradually did not remain. Through his work, Yang approaches visually the theme of the ars moriendi of the entropic body in pain as reminder of its mortal, gradually disabling fabric. [II] In the section of his work dedicated to AIDS, Gilman discusses only a collection of posters that have circulated in mass-media, which he researched at the National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland. Gilman thinks these posters function as the “still images of illness” (174). In other words, he believes these posters may have had an impact on the lay community, although not the intensified, urgent one, as he would have hoped. Because Gilman did not include a single photo of a patient dying of AIDS — although he understood this lack — I juxtapose one of the posters from his book with Yang’s photos taken of his dying friend, Allan, from his project entitled Sadness: A Monologue with Slides. Here I discuss the impact of Allan’s increasingly emaciated body versus the static, almost ineffective quality of the poster in order to consider the idea according to which “AIDS victims are living sculptures. … Both subject and object of art … they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. … It is an art of continuous transformation of subject into object and object into subject” (Siebers 220-21). Yang is an Australian artist with Chinese parentage. The images presented in this section originally appeared in print in Thomas W. Sokolowski’s and Rosalind Solomon’s collection of essays entitled Portraits in the Time of AIDS. According to the editors, Yang presented them as “monologues with slide projection in the theatre” (34) because the main actor of this one-man show is dying of AIDS. Yang’s work consists of seventeen slides with short texts written underneath them. In an attempt to respect the body that is dying, the texts are not recited, but the readers/spectators read them subvocally. The brilliance of this piece resides in its hushed tone, which parallels the act of dying when the patient’s body and mind become more and more tacit and lifeless. From one photo to another, and from one text to another, we discover Allan, although we never quite get to know him. The minitexts relate Allan’s story: how he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s, known as “the AIDS ward” (35); how he decided to return home, into a studio shared with a dealer; how AIDS first attacked his lungs, and so he had to keep next to him “a large cylinder of oxygen as he was often out of breath” (37); how AIDS then affected his sight, and he developed a condition known as “CytoMegalo Virus — C.M.V. Retinctus” that gradually “destroyed the retina” of his eyes (39); how he decided “to go off medication” (46); and, how, finally “he went into a coma. I saw a nurse give him a glass of water but the water just ran out of his mouth” (50). To look at these photos time and time again is to be reminded of Albert Einstein’s vision of the passenger trapped in the train running with the speed of light. That passenger could not sense all that was happening in the train, and especially outside of it, because time moves in its cosmic, non-human, slippery dimension, and thus sensation could not profusely permeate his body. Juxtaposing Einstein’s vision with Allan’s decaying body, I read the latter’s body as if it were coiled up inside his mind just like a snail covers a part of its body under its hard shell. The photos are presented rapidly with no entr-acte in between; in a matter of minutes, time and space seem to collapse. There is no time for a prolonged reminiscence of Allan’s spent life. Allan is dying now, and he does not have time to remember his life. He barely has time to feel his body, a touch, or a kiss on his face, which seems to Yang “to have caved in” (47). Through this work, not only does Yang capture the disturbing moments of a friend dying, but he also touches on the “epidermis” of despair. This “epidermis” is both endotopic and exotopic, meaning that it starts within the patient and then it radiates/extends to his relatives and friends. Yang’s images of Allan dying give the impression that his body levitates, jutting out into space — but unfortunately without much meaning. On the other hand, the posters advertised for AIDS are simple, if not quite embarrassing and disrespectful given the gravity of this illness. They rarely touch on any aspects related to the illness itself, as they allude more to the immorality of homosexual acts. Gilman explains part of the rationale involved in the process of not presenting people dying of AIDS as follows: The image of the ‘positive’ body or the body with AIDS is strictly controlled in the world of the public health poster. Nowhere is an image of the ‘ugly’ or diseased body evoked directly, for any such evocation would refer back to the initial sense as a ‘gay’ disease. … Mens non sana in corpore insano cannot be the motto. For representing the ill body as a dying body is not possible. Such a body would point to ‘deviance from the norm’ in the form of illness. And this association with homosexuality and addiction labeled as illness must be suppressed. … All these images are images not of educating, but of control. (162) The poster chosen for illustration reads “LOVE AIDS PEOPLE,” with AIDS used as a verb and not as a noun; nonetheless, the construction’s subtlety is rather counterproductive. To a certain extent, this poster can be related to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). There, the Apostle touches the actual wound because he needs tactile proof to accept its existence. The act of touching, as well as the skin open by the wound, reveal the fact that “Skin lacks the depth, the interiority we want it to give us. … The flesh we crave as confirmation of our forms cannot do anything but turn us forever out even as we burrow into the holes we find there” (Phelan 42). But the poster presented below brings into focus verbally (therefore propagandistically) how one’s body might be destroyed because of AIDS. Furthermore, the symbol of the arrow is a recurrent motif in the art representing AIDS, especially in light of its religious association with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (see for example David Wojnarowicz art works which offer a personal interpretation of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). But if LOVE AIDS PEOPLE, and if gay men identify themselves with a martyr, then they might easily fall target to this twisted logic and think of themselves as victims. As Larry Kramer notes, gay men are tragic people partly because they feel responsible for an illness that has been affecting both the homosexual and heterosexual communities: “The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works like this: HIV allows ‘them’ to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our minds — their thinking we are sick — and in the eyes of the world — everyone thinking we are sick” (65).Gay men have always been a target since, allegedly, they are a menace to the institution of marriage, procreation, and to morality in general. Endocrinology studies have been conducted on gay men, but their results have not been able to say with certainty why some people prefer to engage in homosexual rather than heterosexual acts. According to Jennifer Terry, earlier studies from the 1930s aimed at determining distinct somatic features of homosexuals for the most part failed to produce any such evidence. Most of them focused on the overall physical structure of bodies, measuring skeletal features, pelvic angles and things like muscle density and hair distribution. (144) (Another useful resource is Holt N. Parker’s 2001 article “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists.”) How and by whom are our sexual identities created? Does the presence of one specific anatomical organ delimit one person’s sexual identity? We have been trained into believing that there are only two genders, male and female, partly because of our binary way of thinking. Needless to say, just as in one color there are degrees of its intensity and saturation, so there are in us verbal, behavioral, and sexual tendencies that could make us look and act more or less masculine or feminine. Even more productive is to note the importance of power (control) and the erotic in our lives considering that the photos (and the minitexts) presenting Allan seem insufficient to initiate a dialogue by themselves. Because the eroticized body is what dies, that is, what is put at risk or could become powerless because of AIDS. The body that cannot touch and be touched anymore; the body that cannot control its needs and desires; and, ultimately, the body that is deprived of its pleasures and thus loses its erotic self. Therefore, AIDS is not only a way to redefine our erotic life, but also becomes a reason to question our hygiene practices. Elizabeth Grosz points out that “erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur” (195). But when erotic pleasures are controlled, as seems to be the case because of AIDS, have we intervened in such a manner as to program our intercourse? Admittedly, AIDS is predominantly linked with one’s sexuality and, hence, it could make one feel too self-aware about one’s needs, as well as rigid and self-conscious in an (intimate) act which, in essence, is all about losing oneself, being uninhibited. In the end, Allan’s sense of identity seems to be imprinted only in the camera’s objective lens. After he died, as Yang remembers, “I read his diaries […]. AIDS was a tragedy that was for sure, but as well he had an addictive personality and his day to day life was full of desperation. I hadn’t realize the extent of this and it came as a shock. Yet there were moments of clarity when his fresh test for life shone” (51). Yang does not say more about Allan’s intimate writings and, as he suggests, it was quite surprising for him to discover a richer, more intimate dimension of his friend. Still, until Allan’s diaries will be released to the public to offer us a more palpable view on his life, we rely exclusively on the selections of photos and minitexts accomplished by Yang, thus being aware that, no matter how exquisite they are, they could only say a few things about this enigmatic patient.[III] After exposing Allan’s gradually collapsing body, we may want to analyze to which extent is dying/death something that reveals our self-centricity. It is by now a truism to say that death is the final moment of our embodiment to which we are denied access. Nonetheless, we cannot stop thinking about (our) death, and the last passage of this essay proposes its own reflection on this subject. Norbert Elias argues that each one of us is a homo clausus (Latin for “closed, self-sufficient being”). He believes that this condition is a consequence of our living an advanced phase in our individualized life. Surprisingly, he relates this self-sufficiency to the ritual of dying. He believes that in highly industrialized societies, a patient may benefit from the most recent technical and medical equipment, but that that person usually dies alone, meaning without his family/relatives around him. On the other hand, as he goes on to argue, “families in less developed states … often go hand in hand with far greater inequalities of power between men and women. [The dying] take leave of the world publicly, within a circle of people most of whom have strong emotive value for them, and for whom they themselves have a such a value. They die unhygienically, but not alone” (87). Elias does not explore this idea in depth, so we are left to wonder what he meant by dying unhygienically, or if he thought that method was better in coping with death. Also, he never mentioned the exact countries/regions he had in mind when he made that remark; therefore, we are left unsatisfied by his comment. Nonetheless, as Elias reminds us, it is important to remember that the traditional death rituals were and are intimate moments (and they should remain like this). The homo clausus idea may be linked with a body that is reaching its final embodiment, and hence becoming a closing-in-itself body. However, how does a body transact and/or negotiate the moments of its final embodiment? The process of sinking in one’s body, to which I refer, is not a visually, aurally, or especially olfactorily pleasant experience. Our deceitful memory misdirects our emotional brains by indicating which subsystem is still functional and open and which has become useless, that is, closed. In this light, we should redefine Elias’s idea by saying that what appears to be a monolithic structure — a body: closed, sealed, and/or self-contained — is in fact a very fluid body; that death does not reveal our self-centricity because that reasoning may generate an absurd idea, namely, we die alone because we have spent a life alone. Consequently, the dying body becomes the margin par excellence, which, because it is completely out of control, does not stop from leaking and/or emitting smells. This theory is confirmed by a study conducted on dying patients, Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care (2000), where Julia Lawton notes that “on a number of occasions, staff kept aromatherapy oil burners running throughout the day and night in an attempt to veil the odour of excretia, vomit and rotting flesh. … I observed that smell created a boundary around a patient, repelling others away” (135). One has to close one’s eyes to vaguely imagine what it must feel like for the medical personnel to keep the vigil of the dying bodies. Nonetheless, the lay community is exposed to photographs of the dying only on rare occasions. According to Gilman, these images are not made public because “The classical model of ‘healthy/beauty’ and ‘illness/ugliness’ is part of a cultural baggage that accompanies any representation of the ill or healthy body” (118-19). While the skin is endowed with the capacity of regenerating itself after it has been wounded, thus effacing time, a photograph of a dying body seems to efface one’s memory of one’s accumulated experiences. Such a photograph makes its contents (that is, the time, location, personal context of the shooting) disappear since its details will eventually fade away. As a corollary, the absent body effaces its photographed version, leaving it few chances to be remembered. The theme of the ars moriendi, as presented in this essay, has demonstrated that what dies is not only one’s body, but also the echoed memory of its erotic self. ReferencesElias, Norbert. The Loneliness of Dying. New York: Blackwell, 1985. Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.New York: Routledge, 1995. Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gay. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Lawton, Julia. Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care. New York: Routledge, 2000. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995. Peggy Phelan. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Siebers, Tobin. The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Jennifer Terry. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity.” Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995: 135-162. Yang, William. “Allan from Sadness: A Monologue with Slides.” Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Eds. Thomas W. Sokolowski and Rosalind Solomon. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, 1988: 34-51.

Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, "teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 245) In the opening sequence to John Carpenter's The Thing (Universal Pictures, 1982), a lone husky flees a Norwegian gunman across the Antarctic tundra. The dog is resuced by an American scientific team and the gunman is killed, leaving no explanation for the hunt. Later, when the dog is caged along with the American husky pack, it mutates violently, attacking the other dogs and members of the expedition. It becomes apparent that what the Americans have taken into their isolated community is an alien lifeform capable of adopting the form of creatures it kills, and the team have no way of knowing who has been replicated/replaced already. Given that Carpenter unashamedly borrows images and dialogue from Howard Hawks in so many of his other films, it is ironic that this film should self-consciously avoid borrowing from Hawks's The Thing From Another World (RKO, 1951 [Dir: Christian Nyby]), of which it is ostensibly a remake. Hawks's Arctic Cold War story is replaced by an Antarctic horror tale-the two films are literally poles apart. The obvious key to this difference is that Rob Bottin's special effects wizardry enables Carpenter (through Bill Lancaster's screenplay) to adhere more closely to the plot of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella ("Who Goes There?") about a shape-shifting menace generating paranoia among inhabitants of a small community. Hawks's film (screenplay by Charles Lederer) also hinges on a sense of paranoia, but its source is unequivocal: Hawks's alien is little more than a blood-sucking vegetable from space. Paranoia in Carpenter's film has something to do with the fear of being killed, but is also as much a matter of not knowing what form the enemy is taking at any point in time. Of course, the special effects do not contribute to this uncertainty-the paranoia is at its most intense when things appear to be normal. Yet this intensity is fed in the first instance by knowing the excesses of which "the thing" is capable when forced to reveal itself. The irony of this remake not being made in the image of its original is compounded by the fact that Carpenter's film was panned by critics and failed badly at the box office on its release in 1982-by contrast, the 1951 version is widely considered to be a classic, credited with starting the alien SF film boom of the 1950s. More recently, Carpenter's film has acquired something of a cult status. Indeed, a 1999 poll by British Total Film magazine rated The Thing as the eleventh scariest film of all time. Yet clearly the "gore factor" which gives to such a film its cult status was a contributing factor in its initial failure, although I think it is necessary to be sure of what we mean when we say this. The timing of the release of The Thing is generally thought to have been a major factor, based on the assumption that a filmgoing public still enamoured with Spielberg's E.T. was always going to be unreceptive to Carpenter's shapeshifting horror. What may be even more pertinent was that Carpenter's horror was released onto the big screen about the time that this same filmgoing public was coming to terms with a new "horror": the advent of AIDS. I recently read a commentary on the resurgence of interest in The Thing, in which the author claims that Carpenter's film functioned in 1982 as a cold war metaphor after the manner of the 1951 original, and that it is the potential AIDS resonances in the film-in as much as "the only way to detect alien infection is a 'blood test'"-which strike a chord with newer audiences. To my way of thinking, Bryant Frazer's review for Deep Focus provides a more appropriate assessment of the immediate context for The Thing when he categorises it "as part of a movement in genre film that dealt with biological horror" along with films like Ridley Scott's Alien and David Cronenberg's Scanners and Videodrome. As Frazer observes, these films provide "unsettling visions of anxiety over the physical nature of our bodies, and of the possibility that our essential natures may be changed by alien entities, by pollutants and disease". Yet Carpenter's film sits uneasily alongside other biohorror films, perhaps because it is such an extreme product of this movement. Scott's virtually indestructible xenomorph literally burst (through John Hurt's chest) onto cinema screens to terrorise audiences by its capacity to turn human beings into expendable commodities (mere links on the food chain or hosts along the creature's parasitic life cycle). Yet this alien's capacity for the spectacular kill is dwarfed by Carpenter's outrageous shapeshifter, sprouting tentacles, serpentine heads, razor-sharp teeth, and other amorphous extensions from what would seem to be normal bodies. Mainstream cinema audiences may have loved Spielberg's tubby, telecommunicating extraterrestrial enough to shun Carpenter's killer, but it may be that even fans of Scott's space monster might have failed to share in the spirit of Carpenter's knowing wink at excess-recall the response of Windows (Thomas Waites) when a severed head sprouts legs and scuttles away: "You've got to be fucking kidding." The irony is that, in spite of its obvious excesses, Carpenter's alien is still closer to home than Scott's: the latter occupies the human body by infestation, the former by infection. Frazer makes explicit the particular resonance of this difference in the biohorror film: "The Thing can be read as a parable of the self-destructive 'witch-hunt' mentality, or of the ravages that an insidious killer like AIDS (just blossoming as The Thing was being shot) can wreak on the survivors, as well as those infected." The point to be made here is that the excesses of Carpenter's film may not, in and of themselves, be sufficient to explain its capacity to unnerve its potential audience at the time of its release. In 1982, the syndrome formerly identified as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) was renamed AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) as it was discovered that the agent, "possibly a virus that could be spread through blood," could affect people other than just gay men: the first recipient by blood transfusion was identified in the United States as were the first affected infants (Avert: AIDS History). Perhaps unwittingly, Carpenter's film mirrors the spread of discourses about the AIDS syndrome, as much as its monster mirrors the virus itself. The fact that the protagonists in the film are all men living in isolation provides a none too subtle reference to the gay male community to which it was initially thought that GRID could be solely attributed. In the film, as in society, the potential for the menace to spread beyond this immediate community is identified with the knowledge that it spreads through blood, a knowledge that translates into moral panic. When Copper (Richard A. Dysart) discovers through a computer simulation-closely resembling a simulation called "life," which I remember playing in the 1980s-that "the thing" could consume the human race within days, he determines to stop the spread, and when Copper dies, Blair (Wilfrid Grimley) responds even more violently by trying to cut the team off from its external contacts and supplies. Thus, what the film reflects back to its audience is a recognition that the spread of panic associated with AIDS is every bit as insidious as the spread of the virus associated with the same syndrome. This panic operates by isolating and targeting the victims as though they are the infection themselves, potential killers. Initially, this could be done at group levels-for example, the gay male community at first, then drug users, and so on-yet it ultimately proceeds by reducing the limits of the abject, until all that is left is to isolate the individual in each instance. To have been infected is in itself enough to be identified as having the characteristics of any number of the social evils associated with the spread of the virus, but it is nevertheless enough also to be characterised as a threat of infection to the rest of the human race. In this sense, the victim becomes the virus. The reader may now sense the relevance of the reference to Deleuze and Guattari with which I framed this essay at the outset. The epigraph is taken from "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . ." (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, 232-309), an essay that remains the duo's most sustained elaboration of the processes of "becoming." Borrowing the concept for my purposes here, it can be said that The Thing represents in spectacular form the process of victim becoming virus via mechanisms of social isolation: alienation is literalised in the becoming-alien of members of an already isolated community. Central to an understanding of becoming as a process is the relationship between single and multiple phenomena; "between the pack and the loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between pure multiplicity and the exceptional individual" (244). In The Thing, we may recall, the first inclination we have that something is amiss is that a lone husky (nominally a pack animal) is fleeing a crazed gunman. Deleuze and Guattari enable the concept of the pack to fade into the process of contagion. When the isolated animal is restored to a pack existence, contagion is immediately literalised in the film: it first seems to act as though it is sick, and then we are introduced to the spectacle of this shapeshifter in extremis, spreading itself out into the pack, and then into the community. From this early point in the film, we can no longer be in any doubt that becoming-alien through the mechanism of contagion has nothing to do with the coming into reality of a higher order of being, or of the realisation of potential states, etcetera. Commenting on becoming, Catherine Malabou points out that the Deleuzo-Guattarian understanding is a removal of the concept from "the Hegelian definition of an intermediate state between being and nothingness," as it is "not a hesitation between the abyssal vertigo of absence of form and the security of a particular incarnation" ("Who's Afraid," 1996, 125). For it is precisely at the moment that the animal is ushered towards its apparent destiny at the border of the pack that it lashes out against the security of the pack existence. Instead, The Thing offers a representation of the imposition of the molecular onto the incarnate. For this reason, I consider the film to be a neat container for what remains one of Deleuze and Guattari's more elusive concepts. It demonstrates that "becoming" includes processes at every level from the microbial to the communal, leading us to conclude that the spread of the contagion is inseparable from the panic that consumes the community: they are precisely one and the same process of becoming-alien. For a film to visually represent this relation, of course, what must be rendered visible are the intensities that characterise all becomings, hence the visual excesses to which it goes. It is to these intensities, more so than just the "gore factor" alone, that I think audiences react when they view The Thing, cognisant of the spectre of AIDS. The shapeshifter's metamorphoses are not merely excessive, they are intense, which is to say that they are tenuous (and yet tenable) threads in the process of becoming-alien, which we have seen cuts across the molecular and the communal to unite the social with the physiological. Clifford M. Skoog observes that Deleuze's use of biological terminology with reference to social phenomena and their effects is not strictly referential, nor is it metaphorical: "His work in any case powerfully evokes the kinds of processes we observe in life at its cellular and molecular levels, and is especially provocative concerning the extent to which we might look at language and social life as incorporating a 're-incarnation' of life's most elemental processes" (Thinking's Legacy and the Evolution of Experience, 1998). Carpenter's film, I suggest, evokes much the same connection between discursive and social realities and the elemental stuff of which we are made, all of which is fleeting. In reflecting back to us the social context for the "witch-hunt" mentality, or by literalising the process by which the victim becomes the contagion in the eyes of the witch-hunters, The Thing also provides a stark reminder of the physical limits by which we are bound. Held in the grip of contagion, as our bodies succumb at the cellular level to infection, do we somehow cease to be ourselves? Yet the question is not one of physical essences, as our "selves" are defined as much in the social extensions of the body, in the eye of the beholder, as it were, a Deleuzian point brought home to the audience with intensity by The Thing. Becoming, in this sense, is an unbecoming thing, for it is the very opposite of belonging. It turns away from well-being, from being well, or perhaps from being per se. Do we therefore turn away from becoming? Or, as the resurgence in interest in The Thing in the last few years might prompt us to ask, have we begun at last to look back at the unbecoming things from which we have averted our gaze for so long. References Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1987). Malabou, Catherine. "Who's Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?" Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers (1996): 114-38.

Diseases in human history are not just originating as a hit out of space. Some theologians contend that they must have originated with the human race. Apparently, it is inferred that they have come as a result of human disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden, or as a means of expression of his wrath. Other biblical perspectives ascribe disease to the work of the adversary or the Devil (Job 2:7), jealousy from others (Job 5:2) and self-indulgence (1 Sm 15:1–17, 16:14–15; 23, 1 Cor 10:1ff.). Stigmatisation of people with haemorrhaging condition (the issues of blood) in the biblical accounts of the old Jewish society compares well with stigmatisation of people living with HIV (PLH) in the current dispensation. It is needful to ask whether stigmatisation, discrimination and exclusion of the sick are a recent phenomenon. Landman observes that people with communicable diseases were separated from the rest of the congregation in the Old Testament dispensation. However, in the New Testament, a more charitable standpoint was anticipated because of the revolutionary stance of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. During his ministry, Jesus regarded the outcasts as integral members of the Jewish community. He in fact associated with and touched those who had dreadful diseases like leprosy (Mk 1:40–43, 2:1ff., Jn 8:1–9). Stigmatisation is associated with HIV in Nigeria and all over the world. However, the model of interaction set by Jesus with the Woman with the Issue of Blood in Mark’s narrative in the Gospel proposed a charitable standpoint which if adopted by the Nigerian society will go a long way in stemming the stigma associated with HIV. It is anticipated that these biblical indices will facilitate reduction, if not the eradication of stigma in the society. The text under study will be contextualised.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: In this article, the African reading of the Bible is brought to the fore using a liberating theology of Jesus in the context of the haemorrhaging woman, using this as a standard in ameliorating the stigma experience of PLH in the era of HIV and AIDS in Nigeria context. It is applicable to all fields of biblical study, social sciences and even health practitioners.

Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside downA lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegmThe CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic Bob has Cystic Fibrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art. Spooner has commented, “Contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented” (63). Today, culture’s preoccupation with the body runs the gamut from horror films obsessed with the penetrated body, to subcultural style and body manipulation, and the increasing popularity of plastic surgery makeovers on mainstream television. The body has never been so exposed, so open to the audience’s gaze. Key artists such as Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, the Chapman Brothers, Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, and Sue de Beer respond to this contemporary preoccupation by exploring the body in its manifold Gothic forms. This is a rich body of work that uses abject materials, references slasher movies, and plays with notions of identity, societal violence, body-horror, and the grotesque. This article looks specifically at works by contemporary transgressive artists that utilise their own bodies as site of performance, and the challenges to accepted tastes that this work poses. Performances by Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and Marina Abramovic are analysed in terms of boundaries, identity, and other implications in using the body of the artist as the site of art. Tropes of torture, pain. and body modification are examined as contesting the parameters of what body limits and of what is acceptable in contemporary art practice. An Intimate Canvas: The Artist’s Body as Site So what does it mean to use your own body as site of exploration? The work of artists who use their own bodies as a site of spectacle, as a medium of art, has several interesting implications. By its very nature, such an act is transgressive. It blurs the boundaries between artwork and artist. This creates an interesting tension between self and other and, indeed, arguably explores the notion of self as other. This work has an autobiographical function, in that it not only reveals universal themes of significance to the artist but, given the intimacy of the canvas, it also betrays personal preoccupations, and signifies the artist’s own relationship with the body and bodily practices. The use of the human body as canvas brings an intense physical and emotional proximity to the piece. The bodily traumas that are witnessed via performance art—whether it is Chris Burden being nailed to a Volkswagen (Trans-fixed, 1974) or Marina Abramović and Ulay collapsing, unconscious, lungs filled with carbon dioxide from reciprocal exchange of breaths (Breathing In/Breathing Out, 1977)—constitute an intimate link with the audience that arises from the shock of witnessing these transgressive acts. The body of the artist exposed in this way—a body normally only viewed by a partner, doctor or close family member—creates immediacy, giving the individual spectator in an intimate connection with the artist. Francesca Gavin, in her introductory essay to Hellbound: New Gothic Art, cites this voyeurism as essential to the experience of viewing Gothic art: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). The first of these areas of discomfort to consider is the association of the body with pain, torture and mutilation, and the use of the artist’s body to explore this theme. Pushing the Limits: The Artist’s Body as Site of Pain The work of Marina Abramović has had a powerful effect on the contemporary landscape of body-based performance art that tests the limits of endurance of the corporeal body. Her past projects have focused on the uneasy power exchange between audience and performer. In Rhythm 0 (1974), her first long durational performance, Abramović offered her audience a choice of 72 objects including a gun, a hammer, sugar, and scissors, to be used on her own body, without any limitations on their deployment. This six-hour performance featured a motionless Abramović offering her body passively to the spectators to interact with. The intensity of the resulting video piece is remarkable; the recording of the performance captures the potential dissolution of the societal contract between artist and audience, a mutable discourse of agency and power. Abramović spoke of the sense of fear she experienced during this performance— “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere” (quoted, Danieri 30). Her work plays constantly with the idea of boundaries and limits, often pushing her physical self past extraordinary barriers of pain and exertion, as in Rhythm 5 (1974) where she lost consciousness as a result of smoke inhalation and had to be rescued by the spectators. Amelia Jones has analysed these performances of pain as central to the artist’s desire to establish a connection with the audience during performances: “While pain cannot be shared, its effects can be projected onto others such that they become the site of suffering […] and the original sufferer can attain some semblance of self-containment (paradoxically, through the very penetration and violation of the body” (230). One could also argue that this sharing of experience also effectively normalises the abnormal body by establishing a common bond between viewer and performer. However, this work raises questions for the viewer. Is what these artists do self-harm, presented on a public stage? Is this ethical? And, importantly, is it within the bounds of taste? The answer, it would seem, lies in issues of agency and control and, of course, in the separation of art from life that occurs due to the act of performing itself. As Coogan puts it “[t]he performance frame is contingent and temporary, holding the performer in a liminal, provisional and suspended place” (1). While Abramović’s work experiments with bodily endurance and performative limits, other artists who produce autobiographical, body-based performance can be located within the world of medical discourse and performed disability. An artist who subverts the boundaries of the body, and taste alike, is Ron Athey, the HIV-positive artist who makes performance work based on blood rituals, torture, and cutting. His use of blood is central to his practice, and the fact that this blood, which is let through performances, contains the HIV virus, gives it a doubly abject aspect. His performance Excerpted Rites Transformation (1995) which took place at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis caused an extreme reaction. During this performance Athey pierced own his skin with needles, and also cut into the skin of black artist Daryl Carlton in a mimicry of tribal scarification rituals that highlighted issues of race, then hung handkerchiefs dipped in Carlton’s blood on clotheslines that ran over the heads of the audience. Mary Abbe, an art critic with the Minneapolis Star Tribune who had not attended the performance, wrote an article about the danger posed to the audience by what she wrongly termed Athey’s blood. (Carlton is not HIV positive). It is clear from the tone of this response that such disease causes a profound dis-ease in the beholder. Bob Flanagan’s oeuvre also locates him in this tradition of artists who perform their disability on a public stage. Critics such as Kuppers consider Athey and Flanagan as artists who subvert the medical gaze (Foucault), refusing to accept the passive role of ‘patient’, and defiantly flaunting their abnormal bodies in the public arena. These bodies can also be considered as modified bodies. Sandahl has contextualised Athey’s performance as going beyond the parameters of the human body: “Athey’s radical cyborg identity is a temporary mode of survival, an alternative way of being in there here and now. A body not interested solely in cure nor submissive to medical interventions” (59). Kuppers, in The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, reflects on Flanagan and Athey’s careers as disabled artists. She examines how Flanagan constructs his identity as a chronically ill artist, and his pain performances that allowed him to avoid attracting the sentimental pity associated with illness; replacing audience empathy with shock and often revulsion. Kuppers highlights Flanagan’s use of dark humour in his performances through songs like Fun to be Dead (1997), which work to subvert the dominance of his illness. In fact, Flanagan’s work often asserts his central belief that his relative longevity (he lived to be 43, a decade longer than most CF sufferers) was achieved by his ability to counter the pain of his chronic condition with the pain of his masochistic suffering. The stereotype that the masochist is snivelling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person. I think some of that strength is what I use to combat the illness. (Dick) Athey’s description of his relief at the act of cutting echoes Flanagan’s identification of these rites as way of asserting control over a dysfunctional body: “The sight of your own blood, brought forth from your own hand, spells an almost immediate relief, a release to the pressure valve. It’s a violation that you yourself now control.” What effect does this painful and masochistic art have on the audience? On the act of viewing? On taste itself? Taste and Transgression: Beyond the Parameters of the Body The notion of taste is a hotly debated area in contemporary art practice—arguments rage as to what constitutes good or bad taste. Woodward argues that “[B]ad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals ‘transgressive’ intent” (1). Grunenberg (1997) has addressed the problematic notion of the audience engagement with this mode of Gothic art, asking whether it has ilost its power to shock. He contends that with the contemporary saturation of all media with violent and shocking imagery, “the ability to be shocked and moved by real or fictitious images of horror has been showing positive signs of attrition.” Nevertheless, the proximity of performance, the immediacy of the artist’s body as canvas, the feelings of horror, empathy, and even wonder occasioned by the manipulation and excesses of the body, continue to draw audiences. The artist’s body as site of performance becomes a space in which the audience may inscribe their own narratives. The body is a locus of projection, almost ab-human, “a not-quite-human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other” (Hurley 3–4). As the artist’s body becomes ever more manipulated and pushed beyond boundaries of taste and pain, it forces artist and audience alike to ask what lies beyond the parameters of the body. Experimentation with torture methods, with cutting, with abject materials, seems to lead back inevitably to the notion of Gothic, othered body, and a desire to pass beyond the boundaries of the repeatedly invaded and wracked body. Once you transgress the boundaries of the body, the logical locus that lies beyond is death. Dick’s Sick documents Bob Flanagan’s death, which formed part of the agreement between documentary maker and artist before shooting. Flanagan hoped his body art would continue beyond death: “I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I’m coming along” (Dick). Playing with the shadow of death becomes a mode of performance itself. Abramović recalls her acceptance of this fact in her early performance pieces: “When I was in Yugoslavia I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death and some of my performances really included the possibility of dying, you know, during the piece, it could happen” (quoted in McEvilley 15). She also records her fear experienced during Rhythm 0 (1974), stating “What I learned was that [... ]if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you” (quoted in Danieri 29). Death has receded from us in the 21st century. Death happens in hospitals, in the antiseptic confines of the Intensive Care Unit, it is medicated and mediated by medical staff. Traditional rituals of deathbed conversations and posthumous wakes are gradually disappearing. The discourse of death has grown silent except through the medium of the Gothic and especially the Gothic body, as the Gothic “consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable—that is, death” (McGrath 154). Artists such as Abramović, Flanagan, and Athey function within this Gothic tradition. By insistently presenting their Gothic bodies, they force the audience to acknowledge death, transgression, and decay as realities. With collaborative partners, they mediate the process of surgery, torture, dying, and even the moment of death through photography and lens-based media. This use of media in capturing the moment also functions in a contemporary post-religious society as a mode of replication and, even, perhaps, of immortality. Bold, provocative, and challenging, the work of these transgressive artists continues to challenge the idea of bodily limits and boundaries and highlight the notion of the body as site of transformation. They continue to challenge our taste, our definition of art, and our comfort as audience. The words of Gavin come again to mind: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). Using the artist’s body as site of performance forces us to challenge our conception of art, illness, life and death and leads to a reappraisal of taste itself. References Abbe, Mary. “Bloody Performance Draws Criticism.” Star Tribune 24 Mar. 1994. 1A. Abramovic, Marina. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org›. Athey, Ron. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://ronatheynews.blogspot.ie›. Coogan, Amanda. “What is Performance Art?.” Irish Museum of Modern Art [website] (2011). 4 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212496.htm›. Daneri, Anna, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, L. Hegyi, SR Sanzio, & A. Vettese. Eds. Marina Abramović. Milan: Charta, 2002. Dick, Kirby. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Dir. Kirby Dick. 1997. Flanagan, Bob. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/flanagan/flanagan.html›. Gavin, Francesca. Hellbound: New Gothic Art. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008. Grunenberg, Christoph. “Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 160–212. Kuppers, Petra. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Mc Grath, Patrick. “Transgression and Decay.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. 153–58. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Sandahl, Carrie. “Performing Metaphors: Aids, Disability and Technology.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11.3–4 (2001): 49–60. Woodward, Richard B. “When Bad is Good.” ARTnews [website] (2012). 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.artnews.com/2012/04/12/when-bad-is-good›. Zylinska, Joanna. The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London: Continuum, 2002.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. 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This chapter describes the work of The Balm in Gilead, which grew out of the efforts of Pernessa Seele, an immunologist at Harlem Hospital, to organize local Black faith leaders to address AIDS through the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. As Seele trained African American clergy to incorporate AIDS education into their ministry, she also confronted entrenched homophobia in Black religious institutions. Accordingly, The Balm in Gilead designed programs that would help churches accept and include gay members. In 2001, Seele contracted with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to extend her work with Black churches to sub-Saharan Africa, setting up programs in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. She argued that because of Black people’s particular relationship with church and faith, the approach that The Balm in Gilead had developed in the United States would work in Africa as well. At the same time, this work intersected with a growing interest in addressing “global AIDS” among U.S. leaders, including Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who saw the spread of the disease in Africa as a growing threat to international security.