Viral Networks: HIV and AIDS, Performance, and the Sexual Politics of the Swedish Welfare State in the 1980s

Abstract

This essay marks an intervention into Sweden's international image as a beacon of civil liberties, gender equality, and progressive LGBTQ+ politics. First, it asserts that theatre and performance became strategic tools to help regulate the sexuality and national health of the Swedish population at the height of the AIDS crisis. Second, it suggests the methodological concept of "viral networks" as a means to generate new insights into the myriad forms of collaboration among theatre artists, social workers, union activists, pedagogues, political representatives, and national corporations on the local, regional, and national levels. Through these two lines of argumentation, the essay demonstrates how the Social Democratic welfare state harnessed the stage as a forum to disperse and implement its official sexual politics, defined by normative, punitive, and moralizing standards. In contrast to many countries, where young queer communities mobilized against HIV and AIDS and deployed the arts as a means of protest and community-building, in Sweden the issue was brought to the forefront by left-wing, middle-age, heterosexual men who had been reared in the politicized cultural climate of the 1960s and '70s. This led to a preoccupation with straight cisgendered masculinity, to the detriment of already marginalized social constituencies.