Written in Blood: AIDS and the Politics of Genre

This dissertation will argue that the AIDS text's tendency to explicitly place itself in specific generic histories and traditions is an effort to challenge or access the cultural fantasies associated with those traditions. Works produced in response to the AIDS epidemic are often explicitly marked as belonging or not belonging, challenging or embracing particular generic conventions for political aims in relation to the perceived needs of the specific reading publics to which they are addressed. It is not my aim to argue for or against the validity of these generic fantasies, but to demonstrate the ways in which they are an integral organizing principle of so many representations of AIDS in American cultural life. Each chapter will explore how AIDS was accommodated as a subject by a variety of generic traditions, and will follow a somewhat chronological structure. I begin with "ground zero" for AIDS writers grappling with genre in the early years of the epidemic: historically consolatory writing in honor of the dead in the form of obituaries and elegies. Secondly, I explore the uses of sentimentality and American quilting histories in the development of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Next, I trace a developing tradition of AIDS novels as they respond to shifting historical and political realities and challenge the stability of a coherent narrative of the AIDS epidemic. Finally, a coda examines a spate of documentaries that were released around the 30th anniversary of what were thought to be the first reported cases of HIV infection. My focus on texts by mostly gay men is an attempt to trace the development of AIDS writing proper to queer reading publics and is not meant to erase the impact of the epidemic on other disenfranchised communities in its early years; people of color, women, IV drug users, the homeless, sex workers—many of whom also identified as gay—all have unique relationships to these genres. Likewise, the absence of such a relationship (for example, the lack of obituaries for the homeless) is worthy of its own study. An exploration of the generic traditions of AIDS texts is especially appropriate not just because, as I argue, the texts often beg for attention to their generic dimensions, but also because as a body of work itself, AIDS writing is obviously quite new and the conventions, fantasies and traditions which comprise it are relatively underexplored.