The Domestication of AIDS: Stigma, Gender, and the Body Politic in Japan

Abstract

In this article, I examine the processes by which AIDS has been “domesticated,” and Japanese women stigmatized as vectors of HIV/AIDS, once regarded as a “foreign” disease in Japan. Women are associated with ritual pollution and impurity in the Shinto tradition. At the same time, Japanese women are blamed for eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of material pursuits. As a sequel to the “AIDS panic” of the 1980s, which centered on “foreign women” and women who dated foreigners, in the late 1990s, the Japanese media incited widespread anxiety over a phenomenon known as enjo kōsai, or “compensated dating,” in which Japanese teenage girls are said to exchange favors (sometimes sexual) for money with older Japanese men. After describing the social and political conditions making the link between young girls, consumption, and AIDS appear natural in late 1990s Japan, I draw on material from some interviews with HIV-positive women to show how these women are marginalized by narratives that fail to take the particularity and the heterogeneity of their experiences into account. While these women resist the stigma that goes along with being labeled a “sex worker,” their stories are drowned out by larger stories that speak of the body politic and national concerns over generation divides, demographic shifts, and gender relations in times of rapid social change.