عنوان

The half-breed, the half-dead :

Number

TLets769897

Title Proper

The half-breed, the half-dead :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Carroll, Victoria Elizabeth

Title Proper by Another Author

blood-mixing, queer Latino cultural production, and HIV/AIDS, 1981-1996

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Howard, John De Velling ; Shalson, Lara Simone ; Saunders, Max William Mill

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

King's College London

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2014

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

King's College London

Text preceding or following the note

2014

Text of Note

This project examines cultural production by gay Latinos responding to the American HIV/AIDS epidemic from 1981 to the "protease moment" of 1996, when effective medical treatments emerged. Through close readings of a wide but underrepresented range of published and unpublished literature, performance, and visual art, I argue that key groups of cultural producers accentuated blood-mixing both as a marker of Latino racial and cultural identity and as a vector of HIV transmission in this period. Reading across Chicana feminism (a primary theoretical springboard, I argue, for modern Latino/a studies) and HIV/AIDS scholarship-two discursive contemporaries of 1990s queer theory, rarely discussed in tandem-this thesis evaluates the shaping influence of blood-mixing for Latino hybridity, queer relationality, and viral exchange. This synthesis, which I term "viral mestizaje," proved a unique nexus for subjects identifying as both Latino and gay in the age of AIDS. The thesis redresses several imbalances in the scholarship of HIV/AIDS and Latino/a studies in the U.S. As I argue, HIV in the bloodstreams of particular raced sexed bodies suffused cultural narratives in gay Latino communities, thereby troubling notions of racial specificity during an epidemic often labelled a "gay white man's disease." I first examine abjection as an affective mechanism contouring the lived experiences of queer Latinos with HIV/AIDS. I argue that existing narratives of Latinos as racially ambiguous border-crossers paralleled and patterned rhetoric of viral transmission across spatial boundaries to disrupt the coherence of late twentieth-century identities. In the following two chapters, reaching from the East to West Coasts, I analyse the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the writing of Gil Cuadros to demonstrate and deconstruct dual narratives of assimilation (as both an imperative of American cultural acquisition and a feature of viral reverse transcription) and economies of cross-racial HIV transmission. Finally, I chart the politics of memory and mythology by queer Chicano cultural producers in Los Angeles reading HIV/AIDS through the historical and mythical optics of blood-mixing and its legacies in the borderlands.

Carroll, Victoria Elizabeth

Saunders, Max William Mill

Shalson, Lara Simone

Howard, John De Velling

King's College London

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y