The coronavirus pandemic is a stark reminder of the ways in which national governments and civil society, alike, perpetuate narratives of contagion. Throughout the pandemic, it is clear how the American public has normalized deep cultural attributions of otherness against Asian bodies, perpetuating a historical narrative that marks particularly East Asians as pollutants and disease carriers (Natividad 2020). Spikes in Anti-Asian racism incidents remind us that in times of crises, contagion has always been attributed to marginalized persons through metaphor and stigmatization. (As these descriptive illness metaphors are oftentimes abstract in nature, this Unessay utilizes visual art as a medium to visualize metaphors that communicate illness-based stigma.)

The coronavirus and its relation to Anti-Asian discourse is reminiscent of the ways that queer persons, particularly Black men and trans women of color, have been and continue to be scapegoated as threats to public health. Like the coronavirus, early and modern histories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic do not only refer to a single infectious, scientific and biological disease, but rather a cultural phenomenon that enlists metaphors of otherness and contagion to represent constructs of the illness. Such that these metaphors instigate public reproval and stigmatization of all those who contract it, cultural theorist Paula Treichler famously asserted: AIDS is “an epidemic of meanings and signification, meanings readily apparent in the chaotic assemblage of understandings” (Treichler 1987, 32). One prime example is the process by which metaphorical connections between the vampire and the HIV-positive subject transmuted into the narrative practices of homophobia and racialization. 

Since its large-scale cultural deployment as a Western European literary trope in the nineteenth century, the vampire has become a literary signifier of the quintessential Other, of racial and sexual deviance to normative constructions of society. A symbol for all those perceived as "exotic, alien, unnatural, orgal, anal, compulsive, violent, protean, polymorphic, polyvocal, polysemous, invisible, soulless, transient, superhumanly mobile, infectious, murderous, suicidal, and a threat to wife, children, home, and phallus" (Hansun 1991, 325), the vampire—as a figure—is the ultimate assemblage of all fears and threats to the accepted dominant, cis, heteronormative, healthy, white man of a patriarchal society. As such, many a time, literary works perceive the vampire to be an antagonist that needs to be slain. The demise or vanquishment of the vampire by a hero is a salute to the sustenance of heteronormative practice and belief, and the maintenance of the sexual and national status quo; the hero becomes the savior and is culturally celebrated by the masses for saving the ideals of dominant culture. Similarly, in society, anyone deviant of white dominant culture assumes the role of the antagonist—including Black, Asian, trans, queer bodies. As the White male body is idealized, Black and Asian bodies are stereotyped to be hypermasculine and feminine, respectively, both deviant and thus threats to contemporary understandings of manhood; as heterosexuality is idealized, trans and queer bodies are similarly threats to ideals of the cis, het, monogamous nuclear family. 

As the conception of the vampire as literary signifiers of racial and sexual deviance evolved, dominant hegemonic society conflated deviance (threat) with sickness, figuratively and literally; marked visual and physiological differences of the sick and of racial groups compared to the characteristics of Nosferatu’s ungodly and non-human Count Orlok. In this way, vampires are not only literary signifiers, but act as a metaphorical subject used to oppress marked differences. 

In the case of HIV/AIDS, as vampires allude to unrestrained sexuality as forms of disease, such metaphors perpetuate popular misconceptions that sexual deviance causes HIV/AIDS. As vampiric metaphors for illness are institutionalized, there is a shift from the patient room setting to the social milieu. When this happens, “metaphors overmobilize, they overdescribe, and they powerfully contribute to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill” (Sontag 1990, 182).  Describing persons that are seropositive with HIV/AIDS as a vampiric outsider, society blames the patient for their own medical conditions due to a deviant life style; thereby society heavily stigmatizes queer and trans persons of color who do not fit the norms of heterosexuality. “Framing illness as oppositional to sexual and national values, the vampire functions as an allegorical suggestion that those living with HIV/AIDS or otherwise marked as disease should be banished and feared, punished and slain” (Fink 2010, 417).

For this unessay, I was inspired by the ways in which vampire metaphors have dominated cultural conceptions of illness; in class, metaphors of vampirism popped up in our conversations for wide-ranging illnesses, from syphilis to tuberculosis. To continue with that theme, I was not at all surprised to find that metaphors of vampirism also shaped public understanding of HIV/AIDS, a disease that has long been associated with queer communities. As a queer man, I wanted to pay tribute to those in my comunity affected by incorporating my feelings of hurt into my painting, life within the grasp of Death (Death being capitalized as it represents vampires as death personified). My painting incorporates two underlying messages: (1) to show how HIV/AIDS, like personified Death, slowly kills its patients and (2) to visually represent the stigmatizations of contagion against queer persons.
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1. My painting pays respect to my analyses pertaining to Count Orlok in Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu, where it depicts a vampire who comes to embody not only plague but creeping Death personified. While vampirism in the film alludes to the plague, it embodies similar ideas for patients suffering from the chronic conditions of HIV/AIDS; Death will always approach the living...slowly and gradually...creeping along, forever be present for those afflicted with the long lasting disease, and inevitably kill its host. The pale, thin, pointy, and elongated fingers all allude to the weight loss symptoms of HIV/AIDS patients and the act of penetration—all processes of transmission and sickness that are conflated with vampires. In the painting’s creation, I envisioned painting Count Orlok’s hand reaching, slowly, to the heart, a literal organ that not only pumps blood—a transmissible fluid that can carry disease—but also the site of figurative life and love. (The flowers that spew from the heart further illustrate the heart representing life. The flowers entangled around Orlok’s hand die off, further alluding to Death.) 
2. As our heteronormative society critiques notions of love—who can love, what is family—the heart is central to being the site of oppression for queer, gay lovers. I paint the vampire reaching for the heart to represent the false perceptions perpetuated by stigmatization: HIV/AIDS patients have only themselves to blame for their disease as they interact with unnatural love, unnatural life, and unnatural sex.

Works Cited

Hanson, Ellis. "Undead." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 324-40

Fink, Marty. “AIDS Vampires: Reimagining Illness in Octavia Butler's "Fledgling"’. Science Fiction Studies. Indiana: SF-TH Inc, 2010. 416-432

Natividad, Ivan. Coronavirus: Fear of Asians Rooted in Long American History of Prejudicial Policies. Berkeley News. 2020. https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/02/12/coronavirus-fear-of-asians-rooted-in-long-American-history-of-prejudicial-policies, accessed December 10, 2020

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. 

Treichler, Paula. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification”. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Boston: The MIT Press, 1987. 31-70

Yore, Hannah. Coronavirus and HIV Parallels: On Racializing and Queering Illness. ADVOCATE. Advocate.com. 2020. https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2020/2/26/coronavirus-and-hiv-parallels-racializing-and-queering-illness, accessed December 10, 2020