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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.