”Where Is Your Rage?”: AIDS Generations

The Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and the Centre for American Studies present...

”Where Is Your Rage?”: AIDS Generations

Dr Monica Pearl, University of Manchester
moderated by Benedict Welch
When: Wednesday, 20 November 2024, 1700-1830
Where: University of Sussex Campus, room Arts A 108 

In a handful of recent cultural American texts of different genres – literature, theater, television, and film – episodes of explosive anger on the part of gay men who have survived the AIDS crisis towards younger men who are seemingly oblivious to it expose a wave of rage in cultural representations of the queer community. 

In her talk, ‘”Where Is Your Rage?”: AIDS Generations’, Dr Monica Pearl will provide her account of this phenomenon of intergenerational rage, interrogating the conception of a queer intergenerational community and how ties across queer generations are not only represented in contemporary culture but also practised and lived out.

Dr Monica Pearl is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Twentieth Century American Literature and Film at the University of Manchester, UK. She has written extensively on AIDS representation, including her book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss (Routledge). Her most recent publication is a short essay on the UK AIDS TV show It’s a Sin in The European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is a veteran of ACT UP/New York, a brief account of which experience has recently been published in Radical History Review.