Against ‘AIDS-writers’: HIV/AIDS, writer culture and racial stigma in Cyril Collard’s <i>Taggers</i> (1990)

Cyril Collard's TV-film Taggers (1990), an episode of the series Le Lyonnais , has been largely overlooked in scholarship and public reception. This article takes an intersectional perspective, steering away from the dominant focus on white, middle-class, gay male experiences in studies of AIDS-related cultural production. It examines Taggers as a work that depicts overlapping stigmas of HIV/AIDS, racialisation, drug use, and urban marginality in early 1990s France. It proposes the concept of ‘writer culture’ – encompassing tagging, graffiti, and street art. The analysis shows how Taggers exposes the conflation of criminality, drug use, and racialised identities, and how the tag and signature function as a signum resisting stigmatisation. By situating Collard's work beyond the reductive label of ‘AIDS-writer’, this study highlights his attention to systemic oppression, spatial and social segregation, and the entanglement of race, class, and urban marginality in cultural productions of the period.