Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Foreword Introduction: Crisis/Post-Crisis 1. Gay Redemption: Domestication and Disavowal in the Gay 90s 2. Positive Men Are from Mars, Negative Men Are from Venus: Sero-Melodrama in Queer As Folk 3. Crisis Re-Runs: Barebacking, Chemsex and Post-Crisis Sex Panic 4. AIDS Heritage in The Line of Beauty 5. AIDS Retrovisions: Dallas Buyers Club and The Normal Heart Conclusion: Feeling Generational Notes Bibliography Film and Television References Index

Promotional Information

First book to explore the legacy of HIV/AIDS in popular culture spanning literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world

About the Author

Dion Kagan is an academic, editor and arts writer. He has lectured in gender, screen and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne and is currently researching stigma and disease at La Trobe University.

Reviews

Positive Images should be commended for the way it astutely locates the ongoing and unresolved political consequences of the AIDS epidemic in the singularities of the moving image. Not only does Kagan give us insight into a mode of popular media production working to discipline our contact with queer histories of this crisis – the most destructive example of institutionally sanctioned homophobia in the recent history of the US, UK, and Australia – but he also expertly shows the particular capaciousness of using cinema as a tool for thinking through – and evidencing – such discursive regulation.
*Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies*

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 normalisation 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, USA*

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, Australia*