[ecrea] Positive Images: Gay Men and the Culture of 'Post-Crisis'

New book, /Positive Images/, which has just been released from I. B. 
Tauris in their Gender and Popular Culture series.

_Description:_

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and 
early '90s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the 
advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of 
an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable 
many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has 
this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in 
popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of 
how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past 
two decades. From /Queer as Folk/to /Chemsex/, /The Line of Beauty/to 
/The Normal Heart/, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, 
documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world 
to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 
'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the 
fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the 
modern queer consciousness.

_Endorsements_
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‘In this landmark study of the representation of gay men in contemporary 
popular culture, Dion Kagan shows how the panicked response to AIDS 
during the 1980s continues to haunt “post-crisis” gay life, unsettling 
its normalization by resuscitating the association of homosexuality with 
death and disease. In a series of carefully elaborated case studies 
drawn from the mainstream media and informed by feminist and queer 
theory, Kagan traces the transformation of HIV/AIDS into a signifier of 
social and sexual backwardness that conflicts with the normative 
aspirations of neoliberal gay identities.’

–Robert J. Corber, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in American 
Institutions and Values, Trinity College, Connecticut.


‘In this erudite analysis of representations of Western gay life in 
“postcrisis” times, Dion Kagan re-activates the critical energies of 
early HIV cultural analysis for contemporary queer theory to ask what a 
“positive image” of gay life could possibly be in the current polarised 
environment that lurches between “progressive” attachments to clean, 
upstanding, respectable, sexless marrying types and the sensationalised 
monsters of chemsex, barebacking, HIV-positive sex and sex addiction, 
each of which emerge as figures of a “retrograde” sexuality we “should 
have grown out of by now” that effectively serve to “re-crisis” the 
present. Generous and expansive in its critical engagements, while 
sparkling throughout with astute and perceptive readings, /Positive 
Images/is a remarkable feat of intergenerational queer kinship that 
introduces an exciting new voice in sexuality scholarship’.

–Kane Race, Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies, 
University of Sydney


To support I. B. Tauris and order a paper or electronic version for your 
library, details are here: https://tinyurl.com/y9c4gqu2 
<https://tinyurl.com/y9c4gqu2>

Special Offer Price £50.40 RRP £72.00*Hardback | To order online go to 
www.ibtauris.com <http://www.ibtauris.com> and enter the discount code 
AN2 when prompted.


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