Zarządzanie ambiwalencją. Polski dyskurs ekspercki wokół HIV/AIDS na przełomie lat osiemdziesiątych i dziewięćdziesiątych XX wieku

This article discusses examples derived from the expert discourse on the 1985–1995 HIV/AIDS epidemic in Poland. Presenting the first press and specialist literature narratives about the new epidemic, the author describes the then widespread belief in the effectiveness of education and tolerance as a remedy for the prevailing ‘stupidity’ and ‘ignorance’. He elaborates on the aporia of this approach and the internal contradictions in the specialist discourse on the example of the first Polish book on AIDS by Zofia Kuratowska, a physician and later also Senator of Poland. He also shows how expertise was used to legitimise the well-studied phenomenon of the pedagogy of shame – the stigmatisation and shaming (predominantly of the working class) by liberal elites in the times of Poland’s political transformation. This phenomenon is explained by relating the aversion to sexual minorities, attenuated in the expert discourse on AIDS, to Małgorzata Jacyno’s concept of classist phantasm. The diagnosis is supplemented with a thesis based on the use of psychoanalytical tools, according to which HIV-related violence and harassment during Poland’s political transformation was a manifestation of the unrecognised symbolic aversion to the West.