Mapping the HIV Body in Contemporary Latin American Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1989, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love by the playwright Brad Fraser, opened in Calgary (Canada). The play depicted a group of young people struggling with their romantic lives while a serial killer haunted the streets of Edmonton, killing women and leaving in his wake unidentified human remains. At first glance, it would seem that the play does not address HIV, however, a more careful analysis would reveal that AIDS, as a social phenomenon, runs throughout the entire plot.2 The simultaneity between the search for affection and the murders creates a parallel between love and the human remains scattered around the city by the killer, an analogy that is corroborated by the title itself. The association of these two elements suggests a new and particular bond, one that goes beyond Fraser’s work, as it seems to be a prevalent element in the theatre in the times of AIDS. The resulting metaphor is suggestive; love is linked not only to death, but to bodily fragmentation. As such, the metaphor seems to recover, from a different perspective, the link between love, violence and fate established by romanticism. Fraser’s play serves as a point of departure to approach a particular phenomenon that we can observe in the contemporary Latin American plays that we will be examining here: the change in the forms of representations of the body that is a product of a modification of the corporeal experiences generated by the AIDS crisis. These plays present, among other characteristics, a tendency towards bodily fragmentation and the resulting emergence of a dehumanized soma whose incompleteness prohibits its total identification with the self.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".