History and AIDS in Was and Angels in America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2012
So this is the end, for now, of my Trilogy of Terror. Thank you for indulging me in my personal Portrait of the Artist as a Young Diseased Jew Fag Pariah. Thank you for listening to The Absolutely True Confessions of a Cuilty AIDS Victim. This Briefing for a Descent into Hell has been brought to you by many corporate sponsors, including Burroughs Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, Hemasuction, Lifestyle Urns"^, and the Chubb Medical Group. Special thanks go to Senator Jesse Helms, John Cardinal O'Connor, former Representative William Dannemeyer, and the religious Right for the efforts in prolonging the epidemic. This concludes our presentation of Chronicles of a Death Foretold. Goodbye , and good luck. (David Feinberg, "The Last Piece" in Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Cloné) "Those poor, dumb fairy demonstrators If they weren't out there, I'd have to invent them." (Rev. Jerry Falwell to Dr. Mel White)
Society, 1989
The Reformation of the Holy, Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge, and The Emerging New Class: Implications for Church and Society. She edited Sociological Analysis, served as vice president of the Association for the Sociology' of Religion, and was president of the Religious Research Association.
Reframing AIDS Narratives: New Perspectives on AIDS in Positive and Voices
International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2024
The present paper investigates the shift in fictional representation of AIDS as manifested in Michael Saag's Positive: One Doctor's Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System and Susan Ball's Voices in the Band: A Doctor, Her Patients, and How the Outlook on AIDS Care Changed from Doomed to Hopeful. It explores how the two novels, through their fresh and vivid representation of the patients, redress relevant stereotypes through a semi-documentary, fictional revisiting of their winding routes. It also covers the ways both novels portray the very process of the disease contraction and treatment, and the patients' attempts to cope with it in a balanced manner that invests the documentary as a strategy for braiding the scientific and the literary in the representational process. The overall purpose is not to normalize the disease but rather to help deconstruct the stereotypical image of it in mainstream media and revisit the negative historical, social, and religious associations of it through the selected novels. For this purpose, the "doculiterary" approach is used as an analytical and evaluative critical method to explore the representation of AIDS in the selected novels.
Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS (in AIDS and the Distribution of Crises)
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, 2020
Chapter 8 of the volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke UP 2020), co-edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani. “Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS” is a dialogue between artists, activists, social service providers, and scholars Cecilia Aldarondo, Roger Hallas, Pablo Alvarez, Jim Hubbard, and Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyễn, with an Introduction by Jih-Fei Cheng. The conversation figures between individual and collective experiences with HIV/AIDS. Recorded here is pain, fury, resentment, fear, determination, and more. The first prompt for this asynchronous set of “dispatches” commenced in September 2016. The second prompt was initiated in December 2017 and registers the anxiety and impassioned responses to what was then the new election of US president Donald Trump. Whether their edges are left coarse or worn soft, these memories of AIDS refuse to be resembled—to look exactly like one another or simply reflect one another. They also refuse assembly into a singular or coherent past. We trace these memories of shattered pasts with our fingertips. We struggle to love and hold each other with barriers; we struggle to love and hold each other without barriers.
DISCUSSING THE UNDISCUSSABLE Reflecting on the "End" of AIDS
GLQ, 2019
This thought piece reflects on David Román’s 2000 GLQ article “Not-about-AIDS” as an important intervention in which he critiques other intellectuals and public figures who have proclaimed or celebrated the “end” of AIDS because of combination therapy. I repeat and extend this critique into the present, questioning the lack of memory and discourse on AIDS in contemporary US culture. Like Román, I insist on the importance of humanistic discourse on AIDS through embodied, cultural interventions. Moreover, I point to discursive backlash that humanistic discourse often solicits via a critique of Arlene Croce’s review of Still/Here. Finally, I point to the importance of platforms such as GLQ to continue a critical dialogue on how AIDS is discussed.
2017
Spectatorship is a dialogue with cultural expectations, anxieties and morals. In many activist performances the viewers struggle to come to terms with what is presented onstage either aesthetically, or morally. Accordingly, the art of AIDS is a great paradigm of social struggle which produced works of “high” art (in the sense of technically complex pieces of work). Moreover, early AIDS art publicly exposed the socially intolerable and the morally unacceptable, precisely because the works of art were “infected” with a cultural capital of unbearable otherness and, for some, “abnormality.” The aim of this paper is to examine a common aesthetic technique in the art of AIDS, which is to present the acting subject in limbo between appearance and disappearance, presence and absence as a metaphor for an upcoming death/aphanisis that must be previewed and witnessed. The pieces that are going to be discussed are: the last self-portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989); the last self-portrai...
Transcript excerpt: "Déja Vu: AIDS in Historical Perspective" (IDEAS, CBC Radio, January 1996)
"A mysterious epidemic, hitherto unknown, which had struck terror into all hearts by the rapidity of its spread, the ravages it made, and the apparent helplessness of the physicians to cure it." A quote about AIDS? No. It's about the appearance of syphilis in the early sixteenth century. Writer Colman Jones finds the two diseases share issues, from science and public health to civil liberties and sexuality. This two-part radio program places the current responses to AIDS, from both socio-cultural and medical standpoints, in historical perspective. Using interviews with historians and scientists, archival public health films, radio broadcasts, and readings from classical texts, the series traces the history of venereal diseases from the 1600s to the present, and shows how many of today's concerns have clear precedents in past epidemics. The programs underline how a whole series of biological, psychological and social factors shape the public's perception of dise...