<p>Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 epic <italic>Middlesex</italic> uses its inters... more <p>Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 epic <italic>Middlesex</italic> uses its intersex narrator, Callie/Cal, to interrogate the process of radically changing identity. Cal is a <italic>guevedoce</italic>, possessing a rare but real genetic condition that transforms apparent girls into men at puberty. From butch schoolgirl to effeminate patriarch, never simply male or female, Cal's life is passing. The novel questions, however, whether any categories need be so exclusive. Cal's ambiguous identity echoes myriad others, in plot lines concerning incest, immigration, Islam, and more. Through shifting genres, secret identities, and dramatic plot twists, the novel demonstrates that when society demands strict categories, we are all essentially passing. The chapter gestures forward to a time when the pretense of passing will disappear, and we will all embrace our multifarious, uncategorizable selves.</p>
There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things... more There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist. Those are good things, but still, wouldn't we all much rather never have had it.-Tony Kushner, qtd. in Vorlicky 201 Scare Tactics to Care Tactics AIDS, the most dreaded epidemic in the final decades of the 20 th century, has become an afterthought in the 21 st. The seemingly miraculous preventive drug Truvada is only the most recent of incredible medical advances; increased awareness and behavioral changes have also helped to transform a previous plague into an innocuous news item. Nevertheless, HIV remains incurable and still afflicts1.2 million Americans, and almost thirty-seven million people worldwide (CDC). Popular media has contributed to this transition; AIDS appears less and less frequently in the news, in television, in film. The animated series South Park used a running pun on ‚AIDS‛ and ‚aides‛ in the 2002 episode, ‚Jared Has Aides,‛ in which AIDS is touted as a weight-loss strategy and, in the end, is declared funny because a sufficient (and arbitrary) amount of time had passed: ‚22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny‛ (Parker). 1 Perhaps in response to trivializations such as these, Louise Hogarth created a short documentary with the telling title, Does Anyone Die of AIDS Anymore?; in 2003 she completed a longer film, The Gift, which details the horrifying practice of ‚bugchasing,‛ or engaging in risky behavior to deliberately catch HIV. Both films The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 85 suggest the danger of our current societal attitude; while the disease is still a killer, it is rarely presented as such, thus encouraging complacency rather than activism. The queer theater community, struck particularly hard by the disease, was once at the forefront of AIDS representations, galvanizing the populace to combat an encroaching epidemic. As Steven Winn described earlier plays in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‚It was in the live theater, more than anywhere else in the arts, that AIDS found its most penetrating voice. The forms and immediacy of the medium; the centuries-old potency of agit-prop; the almost sacramental power of live actors enacting stories of death, defiance and endurance all preordained it‛ (201). This, too, has changed, in our contemporary era. A 2004 Village Voice article describes the recent trend in AIDS plays, citing Biro, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and Small Tragedy, as plays in which ‚when AIDS appears, it's just another bombshell-a thematic layer that alerts the audience to something profound‛ (Goldstein). When, then, did the theater community begin to move from a strong activist position to one of peaceful coexistence between man and disease? In this article I examine three queer AIDS plays of the 1990s indicative of the transition from demonizing the virus to demonizing excessive anxiety over its proliferation. As Tony Kushner's epigraph here implies, this change likely stems from an understandable desire to mitigate some of the harsh stereotypes of AIDS victims by creating ‚a kind of community‛ and ‚forg*ing+ alliances‛ (Vorlicky 201). In Angels in America, Jeffrey, and Rent, this sense of community appears so important as to outweigh concerns for safe sex practices; indeed, it is consistently the uninfected who appear outcast and alone. Decades after these plays, what are we to make of their impact? Fear, once a galvanizing force for prevention, becomes the thing to fear itself; safe sex practices become denials of connection and intimacy; the HIV-negative suffer from survivor guilt and exclusion for this sense of community. As the AIDS crisis continues, our response to it-in the media and in art-may well impact out attempts at prevention and an actual cure. Looking Back: How Did We Get Here? Immediately following the first official announcement of the retrovirus by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, AIDS appeared a gradually encroaching intruder, and the theater of the time portrayed it as an emerging and increasingly horrifying menace. Much has been written about Larry Kramer's 1985 The Normal Heart, now revived into an HBO original movie, which contrasts enraged activism and timid passivity. William Finn's less well-known Falsettos, a two-part musical premiering in
There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things... more There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist. Those are good things, but still, wouldn't we all much rather never have had it.-Tony Kushner, qtd. in Vorlicky 201 Scare Tactics to Care Tactics AIDS, the most dreaded epidemic in the final decades of the 20 th century, has become an afterthought in the 21 st. The seemingly miraculous preventive drug Truvada is only the most recent of incredible medical advances; increased awareness and behavioral changes have also helped to transform a previous plague into an innocuous news item. Nevertheless, HIV remains incurable and still afflicts1.2 million Americans, and almost thirty-seven million people worldwide (CDC). Popular media has contributed to this transition; AIDS appears less and less frequently in the news, in television, in film. The animated series South Park used a running pun on ‚AIDS‛ and ‚aides‛ in the 2002 episode, ‚Jared Has Aides,‛ in which AIDS is touted as a weight-loss strategy and, in the end, is declared funny because a sufficient (and arbitrary) amount of time had passed: ‚22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny‛ (Parker). 1 Perhaps in response to trivializations such as these, Louise Hogarth created a short documentary with the telling title, Does Anyone Die of AIDS Anymore?; in 2003 she completed a longer film, The Gift, which details the horrifying practice of ‚bugchasing,‛ or engaging in risky behavior to deliberately catch HIV. Both films The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 85 suggest the danger of our current societal attitude; while the disease is still a killer, it is rarely presented as such, thus encouraging complacency rather than activism. The queer theater community, struck particularly hard by the disease, was once at the forefront of AIDS representations, galvanizing the populace to combat an encroaching epidemic. As Steven Winn described earlier plays in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‚It was in the live theater, more than anywhere else in the arts, that AIDS found its most penetrating voice. The forms and immediacy of the medium; the centuries-old potency of agit-prop; the almost sacramental power of live actors enacting stories of death, defiance and endurance all preordained it‛ (201). This, too, has changed, in our contemporary era. A 2004 Village Voice article describes the recent trend in AIDS plays, citing Biro, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and Small Tragedy, as plays in which ‚when AIDS appears, it's just another bombshell-a thematic layer that alerts the audience to something profound‛ (Goldstein). When, then, did the theater community begin to move from a strong activist position to one of peaceful coexistence between man and disease? In this article I examine three queer AIDS plays of the 1990s indicative of the transition from demonizing the virus to demonizing excessive anxiety over its proliferation. As Tony Kushner's epigraph here implies, this change likely stems from an understandable desire to mitigate some of the harsh stereotypes of AIDS victims by creating ‚a kind of community‛ and ‚forg*ing+ alliances‛ (Vorlicky 201). In Angels in America, Jeffrey, and Rent, this sense of community appears so important as to outweigh concerns for safe sex practices; indeed, it is consistently the uninfected who appear outcast and alone. Decades after these plays, what are we to make of their impact? Fear, once a galvanizing force for prevention, becomes the thing to fear itself; safe sex practices become denials of connection and intimacy; the HIV-negative suffer from survivor guilt and exclusion for this sense of community. As the AIDS crisis continues, our response to it-in the media and in art-may well impact out attempts at prevention and an actual cure. Looking Back: How Did We Get Here? Immediately following the first official announcement of the retrovirus by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, AIDS appeared a gradually encroaching intruder, and the theater of the time portrayed it as an emerging and increasingly horrifying menace. Much has been written about Larry Kramer's 1985 The Normal Heart, now revived into an HBO original movie, which contrasts enraged activism and timid passivity. William Finn's less well-known Falsettos, a two-part musical premiering in
Wittman's Evolving Inclusion in Tripmaster Monkey LARA NARCISI Near the entrance, a true-to-life ... more Wittman's Evolving Inclusion in Tripmaster Monkey LARA NARCISI Near the entrance, a true-to-life sculpture of a Japanese man stood almost naked, holding a hand mirror and looking itself in the eyes. Self-portrait. According to the plaque, the artist had used his own human hair for the hair on his statue. [ ... ] 'It's exact, and it ought to be beautiful.' [said Wittman to Tana] 'But isn't.' 'But isn't.' (166)
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2005
Bom dia, Juca. Para contextualizarmos nosso leitor, você poderia, por favor, começar dizendo quem... more Bom dia, Juca. Para contextualizarmos nosso leitor, você poderia, por favor, começar dizendo quem é Juca Martins? Por onde você andou, onde trabalhou? Juca Martins-Bom dia! Bom, na verdade, o meu interesse pela fotografia começou quando eu tinha 16 ou 17 anos, ou seja, desde a adolescência. Eu gostava muito de pintura, principalmente dos impressionistas franceses. Então, minha ideia era ser pintor e trabalhar com artes visuais; outra opção era ser um cientista, pois eu era muito bom de ciências no colégio. Mas, a revista Realidade fez com que eu me apaixonasse pela fotografia. Quando eu a conheci, passei a ser leitor assíduo. Gostava muito das grandes reportagens de caráter investigativo. Uma das primeiras das quais me lembro foi a do José Hamilton Ribeiro, que trabalhou durante trinta dias em uma fábrica para relatar como era a vida dos operários. Ele não se identificou como jornalista, simplesmente
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2015
Jonathan Franzen’s provocatively-titled 2010 novel, Freedom, interrogates the way this term becam... more Jonathan Franzen’s provocatively-titled 2010 novel, Freedom, interrogates the way this term became an all-encompassing propagandistic code word to justify any American action on a global or individual scale. The novel asks us to question whether “freedom” has come to mean simply a sense of entitlement, enabling our dominion over every available locale. This article examines the ways in which Freedom highlights the microcosmic desire to impact our spaces—for ourselves, for our families, for our friends—as indicative of an intrinsic and destructive passion for exercising our freedom in ways that make no one free. Specifically, this article argues that the problem—for both America as a whole and the novel’s unhappy family in particular—involves a misplaced belief in the power of location to act as a substantial force for change. Franzen’s characters nevertheless consistently seek “elsewheres,” a term used here to describe the unknown spaces that act as empty signifiers in and through which they hope to distill a self. The novel demonstrates that the pursuit of these “elsewheres” as a perceived external solution to internal conflict only demonstrates how circumscribed their, and all of our, alleged freedoms really are.
<p>Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 epic <italic>Middlesex</italic> uses its inters... more <p>Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 epic <italic>Middlesex</italic> uses its intersex narrator, Callie/Cal, to interrogate the process of radically changing identity. Cal is a <italic>guevedoce</italic>, possessing a rare but real genetic condition that transforms apparent girls into men at puberty. From butch schoolgirl to effeminate patriarch, never simply male or female, Cal's life is passing. The novel questions, however, whether any categories need be so exclusive. Cal's ambiguous identity echoes myriad others, in plot lines concerning incest, immigration, Islam, and more. Through shifting genres, secret identities, and dramatic plot twists, the novel demonstrates that when society demands strict categories, we are all essentially passing. The chapter gestures forward to a time when the pretense of passing will disappear, and we will all embrace our multifarious, uncategorizable selves.</p>
There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things... more There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist. Those are good things, but still, wouldn't we all much rather never have had it.-Tony Kushner, qtd. in Vorlicky 201 Scare Tactics to Care Tactics AIDS, the most dreaded epidemic in the final decades of the 20 th century, has become an afterthought in the 21 st. The seemingly miraculous preventive drug Truvada is only the most recent of incredible medical advances; increased awareness and behavioral changes have also helped to transform a previous plague into an innocuous news item. Nevertheless, HIV remains incurable and still afflicts1.2 million Americans, and almost thirty-seven million people worldwide (CDC). Popular media has contributed to this transition; AIDS appears less and less frequently in the news, in television, in film. The animated series South Park used a running pun on ‚AIDS‛ and ‚aides‛ in the 2002 episode, ‚Jared Has Aides,‛ in which AIDS is touted as a weight-loss strategy and, in the end, is declared funny because a sufficient (and arbitrary) amount of time had passed: ‚22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny‛ (Parker). 1 Perhaps in response to trivializations such as these, Louise Hogarth created a short documentary with the telling title, Does Anyone Die of AIDS Anymore?; in 2003 she completed a longer film, The Gift, which details the horrifying practice of ‚bugchasing,‛ or engaging in risky behavior to deliberately catch HIV. Both films The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 85 suggest the danger of our current societal attitude; while the disease is still a killer, it is rarely presented as such, thus encouraging complacency rather than activism. The queer theater community, struck particularly hard by the disease, was once at the forefront of AIDS representations, galvanizing the populace to combat an encroaching epidemic. As Steven Winn described earlier plays in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‚It was in the live theater, more than anywhere else in the arts, that AIDS found its most penetrating voice. The forms and immediacy of the medium; the centuries-old potency of agit-prop; the almost sacramental power of live actors enacting stories of death, defiance and endurance all preordained it‛ (201). This, too, has changed, in our contemporary era. A 2004 Village Voice article describes the recent trend in AIDS plays, citing Biro, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and Small Tragedy, as plays in which ‚when AIDS appears, it's just another bombshell-a thematic layer that alerts the audience to something profound‛ (Goldstein). When, then, did the theater community begin to move from a strong activist position to one of peaceful coexistence between man and disease? In this article I examine three queer AIDS plays of the 1990s indicative of the transition from demonizing the virus to demonizing excessive anxiety over its proliferation. As Tony Kushner's epigraph here implies, this change likely stems from an understandable desire to mitigate some of the harsh stereotypes of AIDS victims by creating ‚a kind of community‛ and ‚forg*ing+ alliances‛ (Vorlicky 201). In Angels in America, Jeffrey, and Rent, this sense of community appears so important as to outweigh concerns for safe sex practices; indeed, it is consistently the uninfected who appear outcast and alone. Decades after these plays, what are we to make of their impact? Fear, once a galvanizing force for prevention, becomes the thing to fear itself; safe sex practices become denials of connection and intimacy; the HIV-negative suffer from survivor guilt and exclusion for this sense of community. As the AIDS crisis continues, our response to it-in the media and in art-may well impact out attempts at prevention and an actual cure. Looking Back: How Did We Get Here? Immediately following the first official announcement of the retrovirus by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, AIDS appeared a gradually encroaching intruder, and the theater of the time portrayed it as an emerging and increasingly horrifying menace. Much has been written about Larry Kramer's 1985 The Normal Heart, now revived into an HBO original movie, which contrasts enraged activism and timid passivity. William Finn's less well-known Falsettos, a two-part musical premiering in
There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things... more There's always been a difficulty with the rhetoric of AIDS. You're trying to find positive things in a holocaust like this, so you say, 'Well, it has taught people certain things and it's made us a different kind of community,' and it actually has forged alliances between the lesbian community and the gay community that didn't exist. Those are good things, but still, wouldn't we all much rather never have had it.-Tony Kushner, qtd. in Vorlicky 201 Scare Tactics to Care Tactics AIDS, the most dreaded epidemic in the final decades of the 20 th century, has become an afterthought in the 21 st. The seemingly miraculous preventive drug Truvada is only the most recent of incredible medical advances; increased awareness and behavioral changes have also helped to transform a previous plague into an innocuous news item. Nevertheless, HIV remains incurable and still afflicts1.2 million Americans, and almost thirty-seven million people worldwide (CDC). Popular media has contributed to this transition; AIDS appears less and less frequently in the news, in television, in film. The animated series South Park used a running pun on ‚AIDS‛ and ‚aides‛ in the 2002 episode, ‚Jared Has Aides,‛ in which AIDS is touted as a weight-loss strategy and, in the end, is declared funny because a sufficient (and arbitrary) amount of time had passed: ‚22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny‛ (Parker). 1 Perhaps in response to trivializations such as these, Louise Hogarth created a short documentary with the telling title, Does Anyone Die of AIDS Anymore?; in 2003 she completed a longer film, The Gift, which details the horrifying practice of ‚bugchasing,‛ or engaging in risky behavior to deliberately catch HIV. Both films The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 85 suggest the danger of our current societal attitude; while the disease is still a killer, it is rarely presented as such, thus encouraging complacency rather than activism. The queer theater community, struck particularly hard by the disease, was once at the forefront of AIDS representations, galvanizing the populace to combat an encroaching epidemic. As Steven Winn described earlier plays in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‚It was in the live theater, more than anywhere else in the arts, that AIDS found its most penetrating voice. The forms and immediacy of the medium; the centuries-old potency of agit-prop; the almost sacramental power of live actors enacting stories of death, defiance and endurance all preordained it‛ (201). This, too, has changed, in our contemporary era. A 2004 Village Voice article describes the recent trend in AIDS plays, citing Biro, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and Small Tragedy, as plays in which ‚when AIDS appears, it's just another bombshell-a thematic layer that alerts the audience to something profound‛ (Goldstein). When, then, did the theater community begin to move from a strong activist position to one of peaceful coexistence between man and disease? In this article I examine three queer AIDS plays of the 1990s indicative of the transition from demonizing the virus to demonizing excessive anxiety over its proliferation. As Tony Kushner's epigraph here implies, this change likely stems from an understandable desire to mitigate some of the harsh stereotypes of AIDS victims by creating ‚a kind of community‛ and ‚forg*ing+ alliances‛ (Vorlicky 201). In Angels in America, Jeffrey, and Rent, this sense of community appears so important as to outweigh concerns for safe sex practices; indeed, it is consistently the uninfected who appear outcast and alone. Decades after these plays, what are we to make of their impact? Fear, once a galvanizing force for prevention, becomes the thing to fear itself; safe sex practices become denials of connection and intimacy; the HIV-negative suffer from survivor guilt and exclusion for this sense of community. As the AIDS crisis continues, our response to it-in the media and in art-may well impact out attempts at prevention and an actual cure. Looking Back: How Did We Get Here? Immediately following the first official announcement of the retrovirus by the Center for Disease Control in 1981, AIDS appeared a gradually encroaching intruder, and the theater of the time portrayed it as an emerging and increasingly horrifying menace. Much has been written about Larry Kramer's 1985 The Normal Heart, now revived into an HBO original movie, which contrasts enraged activism and timid passivity. William Finn's less well-known Falsettos, a two-part musical premiering in
Wittman's Evolving Inclusion in Tripmaster Monkey LARA NARCISI Near the entrance, a true-to-life ... more Wittman's Evolving Inclusion in Tripmaster Monkey LARA NARCISI Near the entrance, a true-to-life sculpture of a Japanese man stood almost naked, holding a hand mirror and looking itself in the eyes. Self-portrait. According to the plaque, the artist had used his own human hair for the hair on his statue. [ ... ] 'It's exact, and it ought to be beautiful.' [said Wittman to Tana] 'But isn't.' 'But isn't.' (166)
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2005
Bom dia, Juca. Para contextualizarmos nosso leitor, você poderia, por favor, começar dizendo quem... more Bom dia, Juca. Para contextualizarmos nosso leitor, você poderia, por favor, começar dizendo quem é Juca Martins? Por onde você andou, onde trabalhou? Juca Martins-Bom dia! Bom, na verdade, o meu interesse pela fotografia começou quando eu tinha 16 ou 17 anos, ou seja, desde a adolescência. Eu gostava muito de pintura, principalmente dos impressionistas franceses. Então, minha ideia era ser pintor e trabalhar com artes visuais; outra opção era ser um cientista, pois eu era muito bom de ciências no colégio. Mas, a revista Realidade fez com que eu me apaixonasse pela fotografia. Quando eu a conheci, passei a ser leitor assíduo. Gostava muito das grandes reportagens de caráter investigativo. Uma das primeiras das quais me lembro foi a do José Hamilton Ribeiro, que trabalhou durante trinta dias em uma fábrica para relatar como era a vida dos operários. Ele não se identificou como jornalista, simplesmente
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2015
Jonathan Franzen’s provocatively-titled 2010 novel, Freedom, interrogates the way this term becam... more Jonathan Franzen’s provocatively-titled 2010 novel, Freedom, interrogates the way this term became an all-encompassing propagandistic code word to justify any American action on a global or individual scale. The novel asks us to question whether “freedom” has come to mean simply a sense of entitlement, enabling our dominion over every available locale. This article examines the ways in which Freedom highlights the microcosmic desire to impact our spaces—for ourselves, for our families, for our friends—as indicative of an intrinsic and destructive passion for exercising our freedom in ways that make no one free. Specifically, this article argues that the problem—for both America as a whole and the novel’s unhappy family in particular—involves a misplaced belief in the power of location to act as a substantial force for change. Franzen’s characters nevertheless consistently seek “elsewheres,” a term used here to describe the unknown spaces that act as empty signifiers in and through which they hope to distill a self. The novel demonstrates that the pursuit of these “elsewheres” as a perceived external solution to internal conflict only demonstrates how circumscribed their, and all of our, alleged freedoms really are.
Uploads
Papers by Lara Narcisi