(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies

Abstract

This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of the personal illness narrative as a mode of political resistance which emerged alongside the movements of feminist health activism and global HIV/AIDS activism. I argue that as a critical illness narrative, which reads the experiences of transnational travel and migration in and through a narrative of illness, race, and sexuality, Sea in the Blood disrupts the genres of both the personal illness narrative and the imperial travel narrative while resisting the assimilative pull of what Charles L. Briggs calls the “political economy of communicability.” Specifically, I argue that Fung resists cultural and political absorption using three primary strategies: the symbolics of blood, the juxtaposition of illness and travel narratives, and the tactics of misalignment, or the self-conscious use of contradictory narratives and competing modes of representation. Through these strategies, Sea in the Blood is installed as a form of revolutionary activism which comments on the historical pathologization of foreign bodies, and exposes the ways in which the medicalization of race underwrites the medicalized history of sexuality. Accordingly, Sea in the Blood inaugurates what might be thought of as a politics of incommunicability through the sensuous and metaphorical re/circulation of foreign bodies.