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Auto/thanatography, Subjectivity, and Sociomedical Discourse in David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

In this article, I explore the implications of sociomedical discourse in reference to collective social identity of gay men, specifically in David Wojnarowicz’s autothanatography, or memoir of dying, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991). Autothanatography as a genre has focused on writing (graph) one’s own (autos) dying and death (Thanatos) and has largely ne glected collective experience as a path of analysis and discussion. This essay has two interrelated aims. The first is to propose a complicating of the subject in autothanatography in order to include instances in which individual identity is bound to collective identity by way of an especially pronounced association in the text, such as it is in Close to the Knives. In other words, I aim to facilitate an expansion of single-subject autothanatographical discourse to include reference to those collective bodies appearing in the text both individually and in the form of community. It is to these bodies that Wojnarowicz feels his own body, and thus his own corporeal death, inextricably linked. The second aim is to demonstrate the implications of overriding sociomedical interpolation in autothanatography. In short, the sociomedical model of HIV/AIDS is one that asserts the infective nature of the gay male body. This assertion provides both a lens through which to view and a mirror that reflects communal, medical, and political concerns of the gay male and his expression of experiential subjectivity engaged within collective identity. In particular, Wojnarowicz’s text is concerned with the space in which social and medical knowledge merge to suggest that the homosexual male “body” (with the plural implied in the collective singular), and its social behaviors, is inherently and irreversibly a site of risk and contagion and thus a site that needs to be simultaneously contained and dismissed. Further, I argue that despite Wojnarowicz’s persistent argument against the sociomedicalized objectification of the gay male body, his text relies on rhetoric that asserts the underpinning of the homosexual body as dangerous and infective.