Visual Residues:  AIDS and Art in the 21st Century

Bujan, Ivan Ivan

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-a66s-fy32

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Visual Residues: AIDS and Art in the 21st Century

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Guided by under-studied archival documents, including public-health and pharmaceutical advertisements, as well as contemporaneous visual art and performance pieces by queer artists of color, this dissertation analyses the critical and evolving role that aesthetics have played in combatting HIV/AIDS since the early days of the pandemic. Drawing on methods and convictions from Performance Studies and Queer of Color Critique, this dissertation addresses a racially and sexually diverse range of cultural producers, invested in not only destabilizing the overwhelming focus on affluent white gay men’s perspectives in AIDS studies, but also in circulating their own culturally specific viewpoints, enlisted toward the survival of various communities. When pursuing such an important task, this dissertation demonstrates that one key strategy these producers turn to is the “reappropriation” of aesthetics. In more recent years, culture workers have raided Reagan-era archives of art and activism to find tropes and icons they can tailor to fit specific aspects of the AIDS crisis in the 21st century. Salient aesthetic revisions over time have brought queer of color subjects closer to the center of HIV/AIDS narratives and their accompanying images—though in truth, their voices have never been absent. Indeed, many cultural productions linked to the pandemic were created by queer people of color, whose foundational efforts have finally come into clearer focus, crucially undoing white gay men’s often-unquestioned primacy in the history of AIDS. To point out this “alternative” lineage in this history, this dissertation asserts that contemporary queer of color and Indigenous cultural production is a result or progression of the labor of artists and activists who have been responding to and resisting racist, homophobic, and transphobic frameworks across the last four decades of AIDS. Aesthetic appropriation then establishes so-called “intergenerational dialogues” between multiple generations of makers and activists who have been laboriously working towards circumventing white supremacy and systemic racism regarding HIV/AIDS. Appropriation remains a relevant tactic today because so many aspects of the ongoing pandemic and its attendant forms of discrimination remain unchanged. As indicated by scholar Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of “temporal drag,” these dynamics have been “dragging” themselves into the present, surfacing vividly, for example, in recent pharmaceutical marketing images that showcase new HIV prevention drugs that fight the virus. This dissertation emphasizes how the seemingly innovative strategies of more ‘inclusive’ and ‘updated’ cultures around HIV/AIDS largely trace back to the existing tactics of prior activism. It also examines the paradoxes of reappropriation; the newest shift in these cultures not only swerves away from critique but embraces “Big Pharmacology” and advertising agencies turn to well-rehearsed images from the history of AIDS activism for their marketing purposes, preserving their widely-admired styles but using them for politically opposite ends, distinct from their radical origins. The importance of bringing queer of color perspectives to perform an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and decolonial critique is asserted as vital for a more comprehensive future of AIDS studies.

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