Condoms and the Making of Sexual Differences in AIDS Heterosexual Culture

Technology not only facilitates the development of new body images, by demonstrating that intercorporeality includes inanimate and even virtual objects and experiences, but it also creates new bodily imperatives and new cultural body image ideals in the process. (Weiss, 1999: 168) In the discourse of safer (hetero)sex the object of the condom is often thought to represent women’s bodies as contagious in relation to HIV/AIDS (Grosz, 1994). Conversely, the image of the condom in public health campaigns promoting safer heterosex practice is perceived to concern an ‘unmarked ’ (Waldby, 1996: 10), ‘absent ’ (Richardson, 1990: 173), ‘invisible ’ (Wilton, 1996: 95) and, moreover, safe heterosexual male body. Thus, for instance, what is considered to be at play in advertisements promoting condom use to heterosexual women is the constitution of gendered sexual difference through the association of women’s bodies and body parts with infection and disease (Waldby, 1996: 10). While the object of the condom in such campaigns is often associated with the configuration of women as the ‘other’, as contagious, what is also perceived to be at issue in interpretations of such AIDS representations is the figuring of a heterosexual masculine self-identity as ‘freed from internalizing the idea of their bodies as dangerous or infec-tious ’ (Waldby, 1996: 10). Moreover, this figuring of heterosexual masculinity as ‘clean ’ and ‘safe ’ is understood to take place in juxtaposition to the object of the condom. Such a reading of the object of the condom – as other to a corporeal heterosexual masculine identity in AIDS culture – is thought to be so powerful that condom use is sometimes thought of as ‘feminizing ’ (Wilton, 1997: 34)