2009-05-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

V18.0493
Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies: The U.S. AIDS Epidemic
SPRING 2009
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DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS
PROGRAM IN GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
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PROFESSOR FRANK LEON ROBERTS
OFFICE HOURS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY: FRANKROBERTS@NYU.EDU
WEDNESDAYS 11-1:45PM
194 MERCER STREET, ROOM 209

Course Description:

This advanced seminar provides students with a rigorous overview of the history of AIDS activism in the United States as well as an introduction to the frontlines of grassroots political activism around HIV/AIDS here in New York City. Through our reading material, we will pay attention to the unique and richly varied forms that queer “activism” around the AIDS epidemic has taken including examples from photography and visual art, film and video, direct action protests, theater, literature, and cultural criticism. These historical readings will be supplemented by guest lectures from representatives from community-based organizations such as The ACT UP Oral History Project, The Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the Visual AIDS Project, and People of Color in Crisis (P.O.C.C.), among others. Topics discussed will include the politics of pornography and “bare backing;” club culture and queer nightlife scenes; bathhouses and public sex; AIDS and the prison industrial complex, histories of AIDS activist community initiatives such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the SILENCE=DEATH project of ACT UP; the emergence of alternative AIDS film, video, and media collectives; people of color and the “new face” of AIDS; the criminality of HIV positive non-disclosure; and the politics behind the “end of AIDS” as a mainstream queer social justice issue in light of a more recent focus on “gay marriage.”

Required Texts:
1. Course Reader/Blackboard Readings
2. Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995)
3. Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer Worldmaking (Wesleyan Press , 2002)
4. Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Beacon Press, 2004)
5. Benjamin Dov Fleury-Steine, Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison (University of Michigan Press, 2008)
6. Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Harvard University Press, 1999)
7. David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indiana University Press, 1998)
8. Michele Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS (Princeton University Press, 2004)
9. David Gere, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS (Univ. of Wisconsin, 2004)
10. Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America (Da Capo Press, 2006)
11. Thomas Sevory, Notorious H.I.V.: The Media Spectacle of Nashuan Williams (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
12. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford University Press, 1995)
13. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press)

*This blog site is intended for student use and communication.

End of Semester Review

2009-04-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

1. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics
keywords: melancholia, moralism, mourning; 10 basic concepts in pyschoanalysis

2. Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality and/or Jose Esteban Munoz “Ghosts of Public Sex,” and/or Allen Berube, “History of Gay Bathhouses”
keywords: 1970s gay sex as performance art; the utility of shame?; generational divide/generational shame; contacts (social realm) vs. networks (capital realm)

3. David M. Halperin, Saint=Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography
keywords: ascesis, technologies of the self; becoming; friendship as a way of life; "queer"

4. David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS &/or Sarah Schulman, “Rent: The Dirt” (etc.) in Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America
keywords: critical generosity, diva identification, critical nostalgia, authenticity, representation, AIDS as trendy/fashionable; "official" art, An epidemic of signification,

5. Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer Worldmaking
&/or David Gere, How To Have Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS
keywords: worldmaking, third spaces, self-fashioning, queer times and temporalities; dancing as mourning/melancholia; theaters of memory,

6. Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life &/or Kenyon Farrow, Frank Leon Roberts, et. Al
keywords: rethinking marriage, heteronormativity, normal vs. normative, gay rights vs. civil rights, gay adoption, morality, moralism, stigmaphile/stigmaphobe

7. Tim Dean, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving”
&/or Leo Bersani, “Is The Rectum a Grave?”
keywords: kinship, AIDS as "life giving" rather than death-sentence, barebacker as identity; AIDS identities; harm & risk reduction; barebacking as critical melancholia; death drive (Freud); barebacking as refusal; de-pathologizing sexual practices

8. Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video
keywords: expert witnesses; mimetic practices, AIDS film and video as an event rather than an object (emphasizing processes of production); documentary film as memory, mourning, the "filmic body," "native informants"

9. Peggy Phelan, “Infected Eyes: Dying Man with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: A View from Here” &/or Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
keywords: identification, counteridentification, disidentification;interpellation vs. performativity

10. Michele Tracy Berger, Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS &/or Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldagers, and Welfare Queens” in Black Queer Studies: An Introduction
keywords: intersectionality (political/representational/structural); intersectional stigma, AIDS as violence ; disidentifying with "queer"; coaltional politics

11. Benjamin Dov Fleury-Steine, Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison &/or Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
keywords: privatization, mitigating destructiveness, PIC (prison industrial complex); the normalization of suffering, zone of lethal abandonment

12. Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America

13. Thomas Sevory, Notorious H.I.V.: The Media Spectacle of Nashuan Williams

Professor Frank Leon Roberts (Lecturer), New York University

End of Semester Review