The Derek Jarman’s Blue (funk)

biotechnovoice as heterotopology of the body with hiv

Abstract

In this article, based on a neomaterialist analysis of discourses, our aim is to analyze the biotechnovoice as a heterotopology of the body (vocal-body) in Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993), taking it as a point of problematization of the life of the dissident gender with HIV in the 1990s. Our interest lies in two distinct yet interrelated areas of inquiry. On the one hand, we seek to examine the ways in which queer and exceptional subjectivities are materialized within the context of cinema, and on the other hand, the ways in which the voice, when read as a biotechnovoice, is placed in the boundary between the body, language, and the processes of subjectivation produced by the AIDS apparatus. In order to account for this network of distribution of agency and effects, we conducted brief discussions about the apparatus, queer cinema, and the concept of biotechnovoice. We conclude that, despite efforts at normalization, neither the voice as a concept nor the vocal-body of the person living with HIV can be subsumed into practices of normative circumscription. In Jarman’s film, it is precisely heterotopology that functions as resistance and invention.