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| author | Robert Marcellus Gordon Jr. |
| title | Casting the Crisis: Representations of Gay Men's Identities and Their Gendering in New York's AIDS Literature |
| abstract | This paper provides an analysis of both negative affect and the unique gendering of gay men in AIDS literature distinguished
by the new social roles that emerged in response to the AIDS crisis. For affect analysis, I use a methodology of three queer theorists: Leo Bersani, Heather Love,
and J. Halberstam. Taking concepts such as Bersani's self-shattering, Love's looking backward, and Halberstam's queer failure, I look at how AIDS writers depict
the hardship of the AIDS crisis. Centered on New York's gay district, the dominant depictions of gay men rely heavily on a gender binary that places caregiver
gays on one feminized side and the protesting activists on the other, masculine side. To look at this relationship, I turn to Eighty-Sixed by David B.
Feinberg and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. Through Eighty-Sixed, I look at how gay men's occupancy of the role of caregiver closely aligns their
altruism with women and the feminist movement that was prominent in the 1980s, bridging some solidarity between the two social justice movements. In the second
text, I look at how the militant rhetoric hones in hyper-masculinized ideas of fighting and resistance. Kramer writes of, as well as practices, highly aggressive
activist methods that mirror the patriarchal and misogynistic rhetoric of the Reagan administration in its silencing of gay and feminist movements. The tactics
that AIDS activists use are meant to encourage participation in AIDS activism but ultimately end up pressuring and demonizing anyone who is unable to dedicate
their entire presence to the AIDS efforts. I turn to Edmund White's Chaos in the last chapter of the thesis to show the lingering negative affects and
fragments of the gay men's gendered system in contemporary gay, New York-based literature. White's novel suggests that holes in the gay community that the AIDS
crisis created are still gaping open, filled only with self-hatred, denial, and isolation. |
| school | The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University |
| degree | B.A. (2017) |
| advisor | Wendy Kolmar |
| committee | Patrick Phillips
Frances Bernstein |
| full text | RMGordonJr.pdf |
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