Description

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called ‘The AIDS Crisis’. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid ’90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture?

Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this ‘post-crisis’ period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

Publisher Review

Positive Images should be commended for the way it astutely locates the ongoing and unresolved political consequences of the AIDS epidemic in the singularities of the moving image. Not only does Kagan give us insight into a mode of popular media production working to discipline our contact with queer histories of this crisis - the most destructive example of institutionally sanctioned homophobia in the recent history of the US, UK, and Australia - but he also expertly shows the particular capaciousness of using cinema as a tool for thinking through - and evidencing - such discursive regulation. * Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies * In this landmark study of the representation of gay men in contemporary popular culture, Dion Kagan shows how the panicked response to AIDS during the 1980s continues to haunt "post-crisis" gay life, unsettling its normalisation by resuscitating the association of homosexuality with death and disease. In a series of carefully elaborated case studies drawn from the mainstream media and informed by feminist and queer theory, Kagan traces the transformation of HIV/AIDS into a signifier of social and sexual backwardness that conflicts with the normative aspirations of neoliberal gay identities. -- Robert J. Corber, William R. Kenan Jr, Professor in American Institutions and Values, Trinity College, Connecticut, USA In this erudite analysis of representations of Western gay life in "postcrisis" times, Dion Kagan re-activates the critical energies of early HIV cultural analysis for contemporary queer theory to ask what a "positive image" of gay life could possibly be in the current polarised environment that lurches between "progressive" attachments to clean, upstanding, respectable, sexless marrying types and the sensationalised monsters of chemsex, barebacking, HIV-positive sex and sex addiction, each of which emerge as figures of a "retrograde" sexuality we "should have grown out of by now" that effectively serve to "re-crisis" the present. Generous and expansive in its critical engagements, while sparkling throughout with astute and perceptive readings, Positive Images is a remarkable feat of intergenerational queer kinship that introduces an exciting new voice in sexuality scholarship. -- Kane Race, Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia