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

本文对应对艾滋病危机而形成的文学经典进行了重新评价。它以前被理解为“男同性恋文学”，它建立了一个“酷儿”艾滋病反应文学的替代体，专注于跨文化联系和联合社区的形成，以应对偏见和社会不平等。本文利用朱迪思·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献，拓宽了我们对艾滋病患者多样性的理解。它重新唤起了被边缘化的文学声音，促进了关于同性恋文学的理论辩论，并证明了我们今天所理解的“酷儿”是对艾滋病的直接回应。20世纪80年代的同性恋文学联合起来，形成了应对艾滋病的经典，抛弃了后石墙时代的性解放叙事，把悲剧作为同性恋身份的信条。虽然悲剧为艾滋病应对叙事的哀歌使命服务，但作者纪念环境的冲动往往排除了作者自己经历的生活描写。因此，艾滋病应对标准被描述为巩固中产阶级男同性恋身份，同时边缘化来自边缘社会地位的声音。格雷戈里·伍兹在《同性恋文学史》（1999）中总结说，由此产生的经典作品是“多愁善感、怀旧和保守的”，莎拉·舒尔曼的《让记录展示》（2021）呼吁对艾滋病行动主义历史上近乎“讽刺”的狭隘进行去中心化，尤其是ACT UP。酷儿理论的某些分支通过嘲笑将酷儿身份作为包容性和社会联系的引擎的愿望来强化这种狭隘性，特别是“反关系”理论家Leo Bersani和Lee Edelman的工作，他们赋予同性恋身份以反对酷儿身份的多元化潜力-我的项目将强调这一点。我的论文通过以下三部分反驳了这种批判性和正统的观点：恢复被边缘化和被遗忘的艾滋病回应文本，这些文本表现出对跨文化社区形成的明显奇怪的强调；通过创新地应用朱迪思·巴特勒的不稳定性理论，为我们理解酷儿艾滋病反应建立一个关键框架；这表明，从艾滋病中产生的“酷儿不稳定”概念继续作为酷儿组织反对现代系统性暴力表现的强调原则，包括气候危机和军事工业综合体。

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.