Erotic welfare sexual theory and politics in the age of epidemic

The emergence of AIDS in contemporary culture has not only produced a vast discourse about the disease but has provoked an anxious proliferation of sites of erotic danger. In "Erotic Welfare", Linda Singer argues that we are currently living in an "age of epidemic", fuelled by a "panic logic" in which the very discourses on various social problems proliferate according to a logic of contagion. It is not merely that AIDS has come into contemporary discourse as a contagious disease, but that contemporary discourse on sexuality has itself come to replicate the course of contagion. For Singer, the epidemic has become essential to the epistemic field within contemporary culture, so that teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, prostitution, are all figured as social diseases whose spread calls to be checked. Contagion has become a major figure in social relationships which appear only tangentially related to AIDS. Singer traces the effects of epidemic on the intensification and augmentation of regulatory mechanisms for the control of sexuality. She lays out the ways in which epidemic logic and heightened regulation affect women's efforts to secure reproductive freedom.