Precarious queers and queer precarity: cross-cultural literary responses to AIDS from David Wojnarowicz to CAConrad

本文重新审视了为应对艾滋病危机而形成的文学经典。它以前被理解为“男同性恋文学”，它建立了另一类“酷儿”艾滋病应对文学，专注于跨文化联系和联盟社区的形成，以应对偏见和社会不平等。本文运用朱迪思·巴特勒关于早产的著作和其他文化理论来分析艾滋病文学，拓宽了我们对艾滋病影响人群的多样性的理解。它重新唤起了被边缘化的文学声音，为有关同性恋文学的理论辩论做出了贡献，并证明了我们今天所理解的“古怪”是对艾滋病的直接反应。20世纪80年代的同性恋文学已经联合起来，形成了应对艾滋病的正典，摒弃了后石墙时代的性解放叙事，将悲剧作为同性恋身份认同的信条。虽然悲剧服务于艾滋病应对叙事的哀悼使命，但作者纪念一个环境的冲动往往排除了对作者本人经历之外的生活的描述。因此，应对艾滋病的标准一直被描述为巩固中产阶级男同性恋者的身份，同时边缘化来自边缘社会地位的声音。格雷戈里·伍兹在1999年出版的《同性恋文学史》一书中总结道，由此产生的经典是“多愁善感、怀旧和保守的”，而莎拉·舒尔曼的《让记录秀》(2021)呼吁对艾滋病活动家历史上近乎讽刺的狭隘进行去中心化处理，尤其是ACT。某些酷儿理论通过嘲笑让酷儿成为包容性和社会关系的引擎的愿望，加剧了这种狭隘，特别是利奥·贝尔萨尼和李·埃德尔曼的工作，他们优先考虑同性恋身份，反对酷儿的多元潜力--我的项目将重点强调这一点。我的论文从三个方面对这一批判和规范的正统理论进行了反击：恢复被边缘化和被遗忘的艾滋病应对文本，这些文本展示了对跨文化社区形成的明显奇怪的强调；通过朱迪思·巴特勒的早熟理论的创新应用，为我们理解奇怪的艾滋病反应建立了一个关键框架；展示了从艾滋病产生的“同性恋早熟”的概念继续作为反对系统性暴力的现代表现形式的同性恋组织的强调原则，包括气候危机和军工复合体。

This thesis re-evaluates the literary canon formed in response to the AIDS crisis. Formerly understood as 'gay male literature,' it establishes an alternative body of 'queer' AIDS-response literature which focuses on cross-cultural connections and coalitional community formation in response to prejudice and social inequality. Using Judith Butler's writings on precarity and other cultural theory to analyse AIDS literature, this thesis broadens our understanding of the diversity of people impacted by AIDS. It reclaims marginalised literary voices, contributes to theoretical debates about gay literature, and demonstrates that 'queerness' as we understand it today arose in direct response to AIDS. Gay literature of the 1980s has coalesced to form the AIDS-response canon, abandoning post-Stonewall narratives of sexual liberation and embracing tragedy as a tenet of gay identity. While tragedy serves the elegiac mission of AIDS-response narratives, the authorial impulse to commemorate a milieu often excludes depictions of lives outwith the author's own experience. As a result, the AIDS-response canon has been characterised as consolidating middle-class gay male identity while marginalising voices that originate from peripheral social positions. Gregory Woods concludes in A History of Gay Literature (1999) that the resulting canon is 'sentimental, nostalgic, and conservative' and Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show (2021) calls for a decentralisation of the almost 'caricatural' narrowness of the history of AIDS activism in general and ACT UP in particular. Certain strands of queer theory intensify this narrowness by deriding the desire to make queerness an engine of inclusivity and social connection, in particular the work of the 'anti-relational' theorists Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman who privilege gay identity in opposition to the pluralistic potentialities of queerness - which my project will highlight instead. My thesis offers a three-part riposte to this critical and canonical orthodoxy by: recovering marginalised and forgotten AIDS-response texts that exhibit a distinctly queer emphasis upon cross-cultural community formation; establishing a critical framework for our comprehension of a queer AIDS-response through the innovative application of Judith Butler's precarity theory; demonstrating that the concept of 'queer precarity' which emerged from AIDS continues to serve as an underscoring principle in queer organising against modern manifestations of systemic violence, including the climate crisis and the military-industrial complex.