AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781138966406)

This is the first book-length study of the rich fiction that has emerged from the AIDS crisis. Examining first the ways in which scientific discourse on AIDS has reflected ideologies of gender and sexuality-such as the construction of AIDS as a disease of gay men, part of a battle over masculinity, and thus largely excluding women with AIDS from public attention-the book considers how such discourses have shaped narrative understandings of AIDS. On the one hand, AIDS is seen as an invariably fatal weakening of an individual's bodily defenses, a depiction often used to reconfirm an identification between disease and a weak and vulnerable gayness. On the other hand, AIDS is understood in terms of an epidemic attributable to gay immorality or unnaturalness. The fiction of AIDS depends upon these two narratives, with one major subgenre of AIDS novel presenting narratives of personal illness, decline, and death, and a second focusing on epidemic spread. These novels also question the narrative structures upon which they depend, intervening particularly against the homophobia of those structures, though also sometimes reinforcing it.

Author: Steven F. Kruger
ISBN-10: 1138966401
ISBN-13: 9781138966406
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 08/26/2016
Pages: 420
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.86d