Abstract
In a handful of recent cultural American texts of different genres – literature, theater, television, and film – episodes of explosive anger on the part of gay men who have survived the AIDS crisis towards younger men who are seemingly oblivious to it expose a wave of rage in cultural representations of the queer community. This talk’s argument is therefore twofold: that more than forty years into the AIDS epidemic, there is an emergent gay rage in cultural texts and also that AIDS produced generationality in gay male culture. Along the way it also interrogates grief, nostalgia, queer community, and memory and memorialization.
This is work in progress, and there will be plenty of time after the talk for questions and discussion.
About the speaker
Monica Pearl is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Twentieth Century American Literature and Film at the University of Manchester, UK. She has written extensively on AIDS representation, including her book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss (Routledge). Her most recent publication is a short essay on the UK AIDS TV show It’s a Sin in The European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is a veteran of ACT UP/New York, a brief account of which experience has recently been published in Radical History Review.
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