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From Fury To Erasure: Shifting Representations Of Hiv/Aids In Queer Art And Politics, Wendy Mallette, Nick Derda

Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

This paper traces the shifting representations of HIV/AIDS in queer art and politics from the late 1980s until the present. We identify a nonlinear trajectory with three major characteristics: 1) militant and explicit representations of HIV/AIDS and their relation to queer sexuality, 2) memorials that publicize the artists’ personal mourning of their HIV/AIDS-related losses, and 3) HIV/AIDS' near disappearance from queer art and politics. This transition throughout the AIDS crisis to contemporary times relates to an ongoing cultural understanding of sex as private issue, a notion that the works of David Wojnarowicz, the Gran Fury Artist Collective, and Robert Blanchon …