Dancing for Our Lives: Danced Lives in HIV/AIDS Literature and Film

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This thesis identifies the intrinsically choreographic imaginary of artists responding to the AIDS crisis inthe 1980s and 1990s in the US and UK. Looking across film, literature and dance, I argue that queerartists used movement to conceptualise their survival at the end of the century. The failure to notice thepatterns of these movements, I propose, has caused cultural histories to lose sight of the reverberationsof 1968-style protests and choreographic practices in the AIDS era in their memorialising of loss andestablishing of homosocial norms in the wake of the crisis. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, thisthesis (re)animates cultural histories of AIDS activism by restoring the place of the choreographic withinthem. Contributing to performance, film, and literary studies discourses on intermediality, queerness,activism, dance criticism and autobiography, I explore how representations of movement in the periodtroubled ideas about queer work and survival.