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" The half-breed, the half-dead : "
Carroll, Victoria Elizabeth
Howard, John De Velling ; Shalson, Lara Simone ; Saunders, Max William Mill
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1102964
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TLets769897
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| Main Entry
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Carroll, Victoria Elizabeth
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| Title & Author
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The half-breed, the half-dead :\ Carroll, Victoria ElizabethHoward, John De Velling ; Shalson, Lara Simone ; Saunders, Max William Mill
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| College
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King's College London
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| Date
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2014
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| student score
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2014
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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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 Through close readings of a wide but underrepresented range of published and unpublished literature, performance, and visual art, I argue that key groups of cultural producers accentuated blood-mixing both as a marker of Latino racial and cultural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.
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Saunders, Max William Mill
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Shalson, Lara Simone
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Howard, John De Velling
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King's College London
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