AIDS Literature and Gay Identity
Title | AIDS Literature and Gay Identity PDF eBook |
Author | Monica B. Pearl |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 209 |
Release | 2013-01-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1136227938 |
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick – and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.
AIDS Literature and Gay Identity
Title | AIDS Literature and Gay Identity PDF eBook |
Author | Monica B. Pearl |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 209 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0415808871 |
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick - and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.
If Memory Serves
Title | If Memory Serves PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Castiglia |
Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
Pages | 271 |
Release | 2011-11-22 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 1452933146 |
How gay memory suppressed after AIDS returns in visions of sexual identity and social idealism
Victory Deferred
Title | Victory Deferred PDF eBook |
Author | John-Manuel Andriote |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 516 |
Release | 1999-06 |
Genre | Health & Fitness |
ISBN | 9780226020495 |
John-Manuel Andriote chronicles the impact of the disease from the coming-out revelry of the 1970s to the post-AIDS gay community of the 1990s, showing how it has changed both individual lives and national organizations. He tells the truly remarkable story of how a health crisis pushed a disjointed jumble of local activists to become a nationally visible and politically powerful civil rights movement, a full-fledged minority group challenging the authority of some of the nations most powerful institutions. Based on hundreds of interviews with those at the forefront of the medical, political, and cultural responses to the disease. Victory Deferred blends personal narratives with institutional histories and organizational politics to show how AIDS forced gay men from their closets and ghettos into the hallways of power to lobby and into the streets to protest.
Martin and John
Title | Martin and John PDF eBook |
Author | Dale Peck |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 2006-08-08 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 9780374530303 |
In Martin and John, Dale Peck weaves together two sets of stories to create a haunting, heartrending portrait of an artist in our time. The first is told episodically by John, a hustler in New York, who falls in love with Martin, a man dying of AIDS. Interwoven with these stories is a second set, in which characters named Martin and John appear, but living different lives. The resulting novel is a work of stunning originality that is "inspired and brilliant" (The Nation).
Melancholia and Moralism
Title | Melancholia and Moralism PDF eBook |
Author | Douglas Crimp |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 344 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | Health & Fitness |
ISBN | 9780262532648 |
Essays challenging the increasing denial of the AIDS crisis and the rise of conservative gay politics. In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society. With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist. Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video "Fast Trip, Long Drop," the Names Project Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future
Title | Between Certain Death and a Possible Future PDF eBook |
Author | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore |
Publisher | arsenal pulp press |
Pages | 251 |
Release | 2021-10-05 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1551528517 |
Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations—the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from this missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives. Here you will find an expansive range of perspectives on a specific generational story—essays that explore and explode conventional wisdom, while also providing a necessary bridge between experiences. These essays respond, with eloquence and incisiveness, to the question: How do we reckon with the trauma that continues to this day, and imagine a way out?