Salón de belleza versus “the dispositif of the person”: body, disease and sexuality

Abstract

In Viajes virales (2012), Lina Meruane provides a critical reading of the literary corpus on AIDS, produced at the height of the epidemic in Latin America. In this book, the author highlights the novel Salón de belleza (1994), by Mario Bellatin, as one of the fundamental works on this theme, in which the writing of the disease denounces the extermination of the Latin American homosexual community, which would include the poor effeminate gay. The novel revolves around a cross-dresser hairdresser who, in the absence of public policies, converts his beauty salon into a ‘moridero’ to shelter the abandoned bodies of sick men who, affected by a contagious disease indirectly associated with homosexuality and AIDS, no longer fit into the category of human person, worthy of basic rights. In turn, assuming a “universal” and “disembodied” individual, the dispositif of the person, as theorized by Roberto Esposito (2009, 2011), has become the key concept that sustains human rights claims, contradictorily, so popular in contemporaneity. In light of these ideas, the aim of this paper is to analyze how Salón de belleza, by focusing on the sick and sexually dissident body, problematizes the effectiveness of the dispositif of the person to guarantee rights, revealing itself, in reality, as a biopolitical apparatus of exclusion and control of bodies: separating biologically-based on health condition, gender and sexuality- who deserves to live and who must die.