Section outline

  • This class explores the 'epidemic of cultural representation' (Treichner; Crimp) surrounding the 1980s AIDS crisis.

    Required Readings/Viewing

    1. Hervé Guibert, "chapters 1 – 12" in To the friend who did not save my life (California: Semiotexte, 2020), pp 15-49. Two copies are available in ULIP library.

    2. Sontag, Susan, Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1990), pp.104–121.

    Further Recommended Reading/Viewing

    Tom Roach, 'Friendship as a way of life' in Foucault, AIDS, and the politics of shared estrangement (New York: SUNY Press, 2012)

    Benjamin Shepard, “ACT UP ‘AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”, in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 20 April 2009

    Jean-Pierre Boule, “The fictitious, the fake or the delirious”, in Hervé Guibert: Voices of the Self (Liverpool: LUP, 1999), trans. J. Fletcher, pp.235 – 260.

    Michael Lucey, “Multivariable social acrobatics and misfit counterpublics”, in Someone, The pragmatics of misfit sexualities ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp.170 – 200.


    Seminar questions:

    Chapters 1-5​

    • How does Guibert portray his illness? ​
    • What representation of (sexual / individual) identity?​
    • His illness is personified in places – where/why?​
    • While disease is a medical phenomenon, illness is a broader socio-cultural issue. Where do we see this in the opening pages?​
    • How medicalised is the narrative? Agar argues that this is a chronicle of the narrator’s attempt not to succumb to the defining taxonomies of medical discourse. Do you agree?​
    • Do we see a return of Sontag’s military metaphors in the opening chapters? Is the body a site of invasion?​

    Chapter 6-12

    • We are first introduced to Muzil. Who is he? ​
    • How does the public intellectual yield to the private? ​
    • How can we connect these chapters with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory in Epistemology of the closet ? Examine the importance of secret and silence. ​
    • What representation of the individual, the disease, sexuality, and the body?