Poetics and Politics of Representation A Study of AIDS Gay Life Writings

Abstract

Autopathographies help us to understand how perception of the self is disrupted when serious newlineillnesses such as HIV/AIDS happen. The purpose of this study was to explore whether newlinewriting autobiographical illness narratives helps its authors to reclaim identity and a sense of newlineself in the face of illness. This dissertation uses the genre of AIDS/Gay life-writings to newlineexplore the bodily disruption and crisis of selfhood due to HIV/AIDS, and how identity is newlinereclaimed through the act of autobiographical representation. Employing the theoretical newlineframework of the cultural critique of the body, the politics of identity, and the social newlinediscourse of homosexuality, this dissertation offers a critical examination of the artistic newlineresponses to the AIDS epidemic by the gay community. Centering its focus on the AIDS newlinediscourse in the analysis of the literary representation of HIV/AIDS, the researcher uses the newlineliterary memoirs of authors like Paul A. Sergios, Scott O Hara, Derek Jarman and Paul newlineMonette, all of whom were gay and all of whom died of AIDS related complications. newline