研究期間：10108~10207;Focusing on the question of emotional governance, the present three-year project seeks to probe the shifting role of the AIDS non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Taiwan by tracing their responses to AIDS stigma. Inspired by Kane Race’s affective reformulation of the policy phrase ‘communities affected by AIDS’, I attempt to capture, through a materialist analysis, the Taiwanese AIDS experience within the economy of emotions. Looking into the subjective formation of HIV-positive people and their social relations, I also aim to investigate how community responses to AIDS are forged through embodied practices and how NGOs diverge on certain key issues with regards to the management of AIDS stigma. I begin this project by looking at the personal narratives of those involved in early AIDS prevention work, showing how specific workings of mourning and melancholia gave rise to the imagined AIDS community in the 1990s. Then I turn to examine two key social events in Taiwan’s AIDS history - namely, the police raid of a gay sex party in 2004, and the 2006 civil lawsuit filed against the Harmony Home Association (which runs a half-way home for people with HIV) - and explore how the newly-institutionalized AIDS NGOs negotiated with the forcible production of stigma and shame. Finally, I consider a mode of governance which has emerged from recent attempts to normalize AIDS in community care, a social technique that seeks to guide people with HIV to live with positive feelings and outlooks, and I meditate on its profound disciplinary effects in relation to the politicization of AIDS. Through discursive analysis and in-depth interviews, I endeavor to chronicle a genealogy of emotional politics on both the individual and the collective level, showing how multiple and contradictory social forces contest, or converge with, state power, and how new social technologies of AIDS condition self-conduct and agency in late modernity. It is hoped that this historical delineation will reveal the imbrication of AIDS NGOs within AIDS official policy while underscoring the liminal politics of shame that form a halo around the progression of AIDS human rights in Taiwan.
