Survival poetics: AIDS, affect, form, and time

In the United States, HIV/AIDS first emerged as a public health crisis in the early 1980s. For years, the diagnosis was a certain death sentence, and, because the disease primarily affected gay men and other marginalized groups, homophobia and other biases meant that the government and other institutions were slow to offer support, and people living with AIDS were often ostracized from society, if not also from their families and communities. In this climate of fear, artists, writers, activists, and other performers began to create works that spoke to the complicated mix of feelings that the AIDS crisis engendered. They also created work designed to increase awareness of the plight of people with AIDS, and sought to memorialize their dead friends and lovers, too. By 1996, effective treatments for HIV had been developed and the disease became a chronic condition as opposed to a fatal one. As a result, art and activism surrounding the AIDS crisis began to lessen, and so did scholarship about it.

My dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis, though perceived to have lasted a brief period of time in the 1980s and 1990s, is still ongoing today, both because people continue to contract HIV and because the crisis had such a profound effect on queer life in the U.S. that it is impossible to discuss LGBTQ+ culture without referring to it. In four chapters that discuss AIDS memoir, AIDS poetry, AIDS performance art, and AIDS video activism, I grapple with the ongoing emotional meanings of these texts and consider the ways in which these artists navigated their relationships to life, death, and time itself.