On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which detailed the rare occurrence of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in otherwise healthy, young, "homosexual" men in Los Angeles. On July 3, 1981, The New York Times declared a "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." However, infections caused by HIV and AIDS had been steadily increasing in the states as well as in Central Africa, Haiti, Canada, and Europe for almost a decade before these reports. AIDS activists sharply criticized the mainstream media, the federal government, and the medical community for their belated acknowledgment of and slow response to the disease.
While the lack of engagement with HIV/AIDS by the media, government, and medical world would long be (and still is) a common theme in discourses about the pandemic, HIV/AIDS immediately captured the passions of artists, poet, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians. In this course, we explore representations of HIV/AIDS in literature and pop culture from the last 40 years. From Larry Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart, which related some of the earliest activist efforts by the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, to Danez Smith's 2017 poetry collection Don't Call Us Dead, which explores what it means to be black, queer, and HIV-positive in America today, the works we read allow us to consider HIV/AIDS from a variety of intersectional perspectives. We explore the linguistic, visual, and sonic tools that artists use to portray an illness that few understand and many stigmatize, consider how creators respond to threats from outside of—and fissures within—activist movements, and discuss the difficulties—and perhaps impossibilities—of fully "representing" an enduring global pandemic.
While we read some "canonical" works of AIDS literature (The Normal Heart, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors), we also use an intersectional lens to discuss representations of HIV/AIDS outside the spheres of white, middle- or upper-class gay men in U.S. contexts. We read works by female, trans, and non-binary writers of color from across the globe, including Sapphire's Push, Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother, Yan Lianke's Dreams of Ding Village, and Masande Ntshanga's The Reactive. We also consider the "here and now" of HIV/AIDS as they affect people in our own community; a major component of our course includes work with Albany's Damien Center, supported by Siena's Center for Academic and Community Engagement (ACE).
Full syllabus available upon request.