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.
Orsolya Katalin Petocz (Wed,) studied this question.