Positive Images: Gay Men and Hiv/AIDS in the Culture of 'Post Crisis'

ISBN-13: 9781784534196 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 320 str.

Dion Kagan

Opis

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, during what was commonly termed "The AIDS Crisis." Since the advent of antiretroviral drugs, however, the connotations of HIV/AIDS have changed: having the virus no longer means certain death. But while these life saving drugs mean that gay men can have a potentially healthy, normal life, what do these changes mean for how they and HIV is presented in popular culture? Positive Images is the first examination of the various methods used to portray gay men and HIV in the media over the past two decades. From Queer As Folk to Dallas Buyer's Club and The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan explores film, documentaries, news coverage, and pornography across the English-speaking world and exposes the socio-cultural foundations upon which those twenty years were based. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacy of the AIDS Crisis and its continued impact upon the modern gay consciousness.

Recenzje

Positive Images should be commended for the way it astutely locates the ongoing and unresolved political consequences of the AIDS epidemic in the singularities of the moving image. Not only does Kagan give us insight into a mode of popular media production working to discipline our contact with queer histories of this crisis - the most destructive example of institutionally sanctioned homophobia in the recent history of the US, UK, and Australia - but he also expertly shows the particular capaciousness of using cinema as a tool for thinking through - and evidencing - such discursive regulation. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Spis treści

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsSeries Editors' ForewordIntroduction: Crisis/Post-Crisis1. Gay Redemption: Domestication and Disavowal in the Gay 90s2. Positive Men Are from Mars, Negative Men Are from Venus: Sero-Melodrama in Queer As Folk3. Crisis Re-Runs: Barebacking, Chemsex and Post-Crisis Sex Panic4. AIDS Heritage in The Line of Beauty5. AIDS Retrovisions: Dallas Buyers Club and The Normal HeartConclusion: Feeling GenerationalNotesBibliographyFilm and Television ReferencesIndex

O autorze

Dion Kagan is an academic, editor and arts critic from Melbourne, Australia. He has lectured in gender, screen and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne and is currently researching stigma and disease at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. Dion has a multidisciplinary background and has published widely on the history, sociality and biopolitics of HIV/AIDS.