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International Gay & Lesbian Review

AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science

by Steven F. Kruger
review

Armida Ayala: Armida Ayala has carried out various projects and studies with the Centers for Disease Control and the California State Office of AIDS on HIV/AIDS intervention and research with women in the sex industry, young men who have sex with men, and injecting drug users in Los Angeles, CA. She has founded several community based HIV intervention projects in Los Angeles and Orange County, CA. She is a member of the California State Office of AIDS Community Planning Working Group and is a doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Southern California.

It is against a political narrative backdrop that we find Kruger's evocative book, Aids Narratives Kruger's work analyzes the political implications in the cultural production of AIDS by rethinking and re-conceptualizing literary genre. Aids Narratives uncovers the political relationships between genre and AIDS, between sexual construction, race, sexual orientation and oppression. Kruger cleverly and humorously confirms metaphors developed by scientists which have been transformed into political, journalistic and literary representations of AIDS.

The book is composed of seven chapters ranging from topics such as the poignant question “is a virus a language?” to the “aesthetics of activism.” The key element of Kruger's analysis is its uncovering of the racial, sexual, and gendered undertones of these narratives. But one of the most powerful sections of Kruger's book lies in its attempt to disassociate sexual orientation from death. The series editor, Barbara Own states this point well as she comments in the preface:


the language of science, Kruger argues, simultaneously produces and reflects a larger cultural narrative that identifies gayness with disease, AIDS with gayness, and death with AIDS. Kruger's project is to rewrite this narrative; the book seeks to disengage queerness from death. (viii)

Kruger's argument calls for a serious re-conceptualization of the cultural construction of AIDS through narrative, which is imperative because of its influence on AIDS policy. The long standing association of AIDS and death with gays has been damaging to gays because of its great impact on policy. Kruger brilliantly illustrates this point when he refers to Senator Jesse Helms' 1987 proposal to prohibit federal funding for AIDS education that promotes or encourages “homosexual activity.” The proposal, in the form of amendment, passed with only two senators opposing it (50). Kruger's conviction offers a powerful analysis for a critical transformation of AIDS in the policy arena.

Kruger's work is especially strong on theory as it sets its course according to the methodological preoccupation of genre. Occasionally this presents a problem because the book is difficult to read, one must pay careful attention to the thick description of Kruger's choice of narratives. However, Kruger's text takes up the enduring questions of gay studies in America—questions that his own work has helped to demarcate. Kruger has found through narratives, representations that tend to emphasize homophobia and structural oppression against gays. Kruger's prevailing discourse distinguishes between the stigmatized and the unstigmatized activity that AIDS is something that only gays get.

Kruger concludes with an impressive bibliography of over a thousand fictional and nonfiction AIDS narratives in its appendix (303-380). The bibliography is divided into five categories: multi-genre anthology, fiction, poetry, drama/performance, and nonfiction narrative. More compelling still, the text of Aids Narratives is richly enmeshed in the narratives of popular culture within the ebb of political events and the flow of economic trends. Kruger's contentions provide a wealth of detail and the author's analyses emerge from clear context. Aids Narratives is an excellent model of narrative engagement.

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International Gay & Lesbian Review
Los Angeles, CA