Space, affect and contagious bodies: Representing HIV in 1990s Czech cinema

Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy – Not Angels But Angels (1994), Body Without Soul (1996) and Mandragora (1996) – depict the Czech queer sex industry of the 1990s. This article examines the films’ representational attitudes to queerness and contagion at the intersection of cultural geography, body studies and affect theory. The films equate queer with contagion. Queer practices question the definition of sexual orientations; spaces used for sex lose the dichotomy of public and private, and sexuality is reduced to bodily functions. Queer bodies are represented as endangered and dangerous at the same time: the virus they might be carrying and transmitting is present as a constant, invisible threat. The possible contagion of the bodies disrupts the borders of normativity and inscribes them with stigma, resulting in shame and fear as the dominant affects inscribed on spaces and experienced in/on bodies.