Female Disappearance Syndrome

Abstract

The pages of Latin American AIDS offer a problematic look at the representation of the infected, portraying unsettling methods of gender-based exclusion of female carriers of the virus. HIV-positive women hardly appear in the writing of the epidemic, and the few transvestites are subject to ridicule and increasing violence as carriers of a particular femininity in the biological body of a man (Gilman, “AIDS and Syphilis”). This exclusion was not only the result of a direct intervention by traditional society against those affected or suspected of being affected by the disease, against all those it saw as undermining the self-sufficiency of capitalism. Dramatically, the texts also reveal the internalization of those prejudices by the sexual minorities themselves, prejudices that they used against each other. The main sufferers of the epidemic were caught up in a tide of mutual suspicion that predated the crisis. And it was AIDS that sparked the conflict between the two most afflicted communities: women (especially feminists, who added the virus to their agenda combating all forms of male violence) and sexual dissidents (especially transvestites), who saw AIDS as embodying a historical discrimination.