As the title of this special issue of French Cultural Studies suggests, HIV and AIDS in the West are often considered in terms of national paradigms, perhaps especially so when referring to the impact of the epidemic within the boundaries of the French nation-state. This is reflected in the fact that most essays and inquiries published in France on the social and cultural effects of the epidemic have tended to treat AIDS in primarily national terms, and demarcated their enquiries accordingly.l If the paradigm of the nation has emerged as the dominant spatial conceptualization of AIDS, then it is for the good reason that medical, scientific and social policies are largely formulated on national levels. Moreover, specific events and representations have often combined to foreground uniquely French dimensions within the narrative of the epidemic: initial difficulties in convincing gay groups of the reality of the situation -coupled with the state's fatal hesitancies in implementing effective prevention structures; the scandal of contaminated blood; the invisibility of condoms due to the legacy of France's Catholicist heritage; the marginality of drug users in French society; and the emergence of 'temoignage' as a politically contentious literary and film genre have each marked the country's experience of AIDS as nationally unique.However, as Jeffery Weeks has pointed out, epidemiological evidence I I would like to thank Jean-Pierre Boule, Dharman Jeyasingham and Dana RudelicFernandez for drawing my attention to some of the material cited in this article.
Film in Australia, as with many other nations, is often seen as an important cultural medium where national stories about belonging and identity can be (re)produced in pleasurable and, at times, complicated ways. One such film is Ray Lawrence’s Lantana. Although striking a chord in Australia as a good film about ‘ basically good people’, people that rang ‘brilliantly’ true (Lantana DVD 2002), this paper argues that, at the same time as it produces a fantasy of a ‘good’ Australia, the film also conducts a regulation of what constitutes Australianness. In many ways the imaginary of Australia offered in this film, to its contemporary, urban, professional and intellectual elite audience, still draws on and (re)produces a vision of an Australian community that uses the same narrative frameworks of protection and control as the cruder discourses of ‘white Australia’ offered to an earlier generation of cinema-goers. This film’s central motif of the lantana bush, the out of control weed, that is known as both foreign and local is here emblematic of tensions about belonging, place and otherness. Yet while, within the film’s knowingly reflexive purview any remaining potential for racism is understood and itself under control – we know how to be good mutliculturalists –it is the trope of sexuality in Lantana that provides the real sense of edginess and anxiety about belonging. It is in this arena that the film sets up an idea of danger and –less self-consciously, and in the end more aggressively – marks out who is and who is not part of the community. In this context the motif of lantana signals an ambivalence about difference and the exotic. Lantana is both desirable because of the difference in its attractive Latin looks and repulsive or feared because of other qualities inherent within its difference: a refusal to behave and a propensity to get out-of control, spread and potentially take over. The film here explores desire for a taste of the other (a gay man, a newly separated woman, a Latin dance teacher). However, these fantasies are in the end emphatically shut down as the film ends by producing a vision of subtly normalised hetero, mono, familial (though not necessarily happy) forms of desiring, loving and reproducing in contemporary Australia.
Paul I want to begin with a little report from The Weekend Australian ('Alien' 2001, 19): Yesterday The Canberra Times ran this self-explanatory apology for a phrase in its Tuesday editorial. 'Most One Nation supporters are "average Australians", not "average stray aliens", as the editorial on Tuesday quoted the Prime Minister as saying. The error began with voice-recognition technology, and was missed by the author and sub-editors'.
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