I Like It...Viral: The Queer Pleasures of Reading and Writing About HIV/AIDS

摘要

In this project, I explore a cultural obsession and a heretofore under-examined area of HIV/AIDS literary and cultural studies scholarship: the pleasures of reading, writing, or talking about HIV infection stories or about the manifestations of the AIDS-laden body. By examining life writing, fiction, and film, I ask the following: what are the various pleasures experienced by producers, narrators, and consumers of HIV/AIDS narratives? What if the safer, more socially acceptable categories of mourning, grief, activism, or cultural memory are not the only forces that propel us through the painful recollections of HIV/AIDS narratives? What might we gain from investigating some of the various registers of narrative pleasure tangled up in the Gordian knot of pleasure and pain that refuses to unravel into two tidy, discrete strands of discernable experience? To probe these concerns a little more forcefully, I read Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (1997), Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997), Louise Hogarth's The Gift (2003), and Dennis Cooper's The Sluts (2004) to highlight three distinct registers of pleasure: voyeurism in narrative, domestication of the threatening HIV-positive subject in fiction, and the eroticization of the virus itself in film and fiction.