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

不稳定的酷儿和酷儿不稳定：从大卫·沃伊纳罗维奇到 CAConrad 的跨文化文学对艾滋病的反应

• 批准号: 2882070
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2882070
• 关键词: Precarious; queers; queer; precarity; cross

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.

本文重新评价了为应对艾滋病危机而形成的文学经典。以前被理解为“男同性恋文学”，它建立了一个“酷儿”艾滋病应对文学的替代机构，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。本文运用朱迪斯·巴特勒关于不稳定性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多样性的理解。它收回边缘化的文学声音，有助于对同性恋文学的理论辩论，并表明，“酷儿”，因为我们今天理解它出现在直接应对艾滋病。20世纪80年代的同性恋文学已经形成了艾滋病应对的经典，放弃了后石墙时代的性解放叙事，并将悲剧作为同性恋身份的原则。虽然悲剧服务于艾滋病反应叙事的挽歌使命，但作者纪念一个环境的冲动往往排除了作者自己经历之外的生活。因此，艾滋病应对准则的特点是巩固了中产阶级男同性恋者的身份，同时边缘化了来自边缘社会地位的声音。格雷戈里·伍兹（Gregory Woods）在《同性恋文学史》（A History of Gay Literature，1999年）中总结说，由此产生的经典是“感伤的，怀旧的，保守的”，莎拉·舒尔曼（Sarah Schulman）的《让记录展示》（Let the Record Show，2021年）呼吁对艾滋病行动主义历史的几乎“漫画式”的狭隘进行去中心化，特别是ACT UP。酷儿理论的某些分支通过嘲笑将酷儿作为包容性和社会联系引擎的愿望而加剧了这种狭隘性，特别是“反关系”理论家利奥·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-我的项目将强调这一点。我的论文提供了一个三部分的反击，以这种批评和规范的正统：恢复边缘化和被遗忘的艾滋病反应文本，表现出一个明显的奇怪的强调跨文化社区的形成;建立一个关键的框架，我们理解一个奇怪的艾滋病反应通过创新应用朱迪思巴特勒的precarity理论;这表明，从艾滋病中产生的“酷儿不稳定性”的概念仍然是酷儿组织反对系统性暴力的现代表现形式的一个突出原则，包括气候危机和军工复合体。