Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed: "If Memory Serves Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past", December 1, 2011
Publisher's Description
The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future.
But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS.
Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory.
Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing—even recognizing—the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment.
Castiglia and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of “ideality politics” in the art of Félix González-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains.
Contents
Introduction: In the Interest of Time
1. Battles over the Gay Past: De-generation and the Queerness of Memory
2. For Time Immemorial: Marking Time in the Built Environment
3. The Revolution Might Be Televised: The Mass Mediation of Gay Memories
4. Queer Theory Is Burning: Sexual Revolution and Traumatic Unremembering
5. Remembering a New Queer Politics: Ideals in the Aftermath of Identity
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The Authors
Christopher Castiglia is liberal arts research professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University.
He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst and Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy and coeditor with Glenn Hendler of Walt Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate.
Christopher Reed is professor of English and visual culture at the Pennsylvania State University.
He is the author of Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity and Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, the editor of Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, and A Roger Fry Reader, editor and translator of The Chrysanthemum Papers: “The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthemum” and Other Documents of French Japonisme, and coeditor with Nancy Green of the exhibition catalog A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections.
Publisher's Website:
