AIDS and Its Metaphors Book by Susan Sontag

AIDS and Its Metaphors Book By Susan Sontag

In many ways, Susan Sontag's work of non-fiction entitled AIDS and Its Metaphors helps to deconstruct some of the fallacies surrounding this disease, while presenting it in its proper medical context. To that end the predominant theme of this work is the identifying and analyzing the realities and misconceptions regarding the many metaphors that are applied to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The author is able to denote approximately four or five commonly used metaphors that relate to AIDS, and underscores their social and medical relevance for those who are involved with this deadly epidemic. The manuscript was originally published in the 1980s, when the perception of AIDS was still relatively novel and intensely terrifying for most of the population in the Western hemispheres.

One of the chief points of benefit of this work is its structure, which is extremely lucid and easy for readers to understand. After an opening segment in which she explicates some of the basic, medical facts about this malady and its treatment, she largely stratifies this work into an examination of the most popular metaphors regarding it. These mostly include the innocent and futility conundrum, war, religious disapproval, as well as AIDS as a foreign plague. In exploring each of these metaphors and how they impact society's regard for this condition, the author is also credited with citing a plethora of historical and literary examples that both contextualize her points and provide examples of them. Thus, the reader is able to gain a clear understanding of each type of metaphor and the repercussions it produces sociologically.

With such a coherent methodology, the book ultimately seeks to help provide the meaning of AIDS -- both as it actually is, and as it is conceived of by the surrounding population. Again, it is a one of the strengths of this work that the author denotes a critical distinction between these two concepts. Thus, she utilizes the former to help clarify the latter and is able to largely return the focus of this malady to its medical roots. Still, the sociological implications that she uncovers while examining some of the specific metaphors related to AIDS are fairly revealing -- if not about the disease, then certainly about the society that utilizes these metaphors.

For instance, in her discussion of the guilty and innocent metaphor, the author notes that those who contract the disease while engaged in sexual activity seem to get a negative stigma attached to them. However, those who incur this condition through transfusions or who are born this way are largely considered innocent and there is a great deal more sympathy and poignancy attached to their cases. What Sontag is really getting at with this sort of analyzes represents the crux of the sociological perspective of AIDS (a fact which is actually existent across metaphors). Since AIDS can get transmitted through unprotected sexual contact, people tend to place a value judgment on this epidemic. It reinforces the notion that unprotected sex or worse, polygamous sex, is in itself inherently base. Thus, all of the other metaphors about the wrath of God and the influx of a foreign plague reinforce this conception within mainstream social settings.