اطلاعات درس

This seminar investigates four decades of British cultural responses to HIV/AIDS. The time span stretches from the description of first cases in 1981 to the release of the critically acclaimed Channel 4 series It’s a Sin (dir. Peter Hoar) in 2021. Beginning our discussion with Susan Sontag’s seminal work AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), alongside Paula A. Treichler’s influential essay on AIDS as “An Epidemic of Signification” (1987), we will unpack the different representations of and reactions to HIV/AIDS in each decade. Relying on Dion Kagan’s framework, we will differentiate earlier responses to the AIDS crisis from what he has identified as the current “post-crisis” mode, which “describes the cultural re-scripting of HIV/AIDS from a state of crisis to one of chronicity” (2018, 15). Amongst the crisis-mode representations we will discuss are selected AIDS elegies by Thom Gunn (1992) and Derek Jarman’s experimental film Blue (1993). Situated on the cusp to post-crisis times is Mark Ravenhill’s in-yer-face drama Some Explicit Polaroids (1999). Finally, we will turn to recent examples, including the Channel 4 series from 2021. We will conclude the seminar by outlining the ways in which HIV/AIDS is currently imagined in British culture and asking how anxieties surrounding gender and sexual identity as well as viral infections, pandemics, and the crisis of care are negotiated through texts that look back at the British AIDS epidemic.