Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-19T10:29:52.416Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - “The Dead Never Die”

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, Queer Temporalities, and the Literature of AIDS

from The Sexuality of American History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2024

Benjamin Kahan
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
Get access

Summary

The chapter examines imaginative writing about AIDS in light of improved medical treatments for HIV, suggesting that every example of AIDS literature functions as a time capsule documenting its historical moment. Yet, the literature of AIDS is haunted by unfinished pasts that scramble its temporalities and unfix its historical locations. This chapter introduces and conceptualizes an emerging “literature of PrEP” (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in work by Jericho Brown, Matthew Lopez, Jacques Rancourt, and Sam Sax, showing how developments in biomedicine have inspired diverse literary reflections on the epidemic’s four-decade history. As exemplified by Lopez’s epic play The Inheritance, PrEP literature engages crucial questions concerning what one queer generation inherits from, or owes to, another. The chapter argues that, in contrast to scientific or sociological accounts of HIV/AIDS, literary representation is uniquely effective at capturing the haunted quality of AIDS writing because it can reveal how ostensibly outmoded forms of the past persist in the present.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • “The Dead Never Die”
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • “The Dead Never Die”
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • “The Dead Never Die”
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
  • Online publication: 17 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108918725.009
Available formats
×