{"id":{"repo_id":"buffalo","oai_identifier":"oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/86717"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/buffalo/oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/86717","repository":{"repo_id":"buffalo","name":"Buffalo","base_url":"https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Contracting Subjectivities: Que(e)rying Gesture, Affect, and Politics in French and American AIDS Literature","abstract":"Ph.D.","abstract_html":"Ph.D.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Capps, Vincent"],"institution":"State University of New York at Buffalo","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Young, Hershini","Comparative Literature"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2025,"date_issued":"2025-02-21T21:36:48Z","date_published":"2025-02-21T21:36:48Z","updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:34Z","subjects":["sexuality","English literature","gender studies"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86717","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Young, Hershini","Comparative Literature"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Capps, Vincent"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2025-02-21T21:36:48Z","2020"]},{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["State University of New York at Buffalo"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Text","Dissertation"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["sexuality","English literature","gender studies"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86717"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Ph.D.","In this study, I most broadly seek to examine what AIDS as a biomedical and sociopolitical crisis has meant for the institution of democracy, literature, and the project of queerness by looking through the specific lenses of gesture, affect, and politics. Through critical queer hermeneutics, I perform a comparative literary analysis of a selected body of AIDS writing from France and America. The secondary methodology I utilize is an experimental mimesis of (auto)fiction and (auto)theory that both primary and secondary queer writers under study here have explored in their projects as a means of cultivating their ideas. This project can overall also be classified as an affective arching gesture, a kind of bearing witness and a taking up of the queer political projects that many AIDS writers and activists began in response to their specific oppression. I first develop what I call Raw Writing, which simply defined is a genre or style of writing deployed by queer and seropositive individuals that utilized queer excess in the form of sex, the body, language, and drugs in order to both make intelligible new subjectivities brought about by HIV as well as to manifest or perform the very potentiality inherent to literature and the act of writing. Through my examination of raw writing, I begin my initial probing of exposure that begins with the rawness of literature that exposes readers to knowledge specifically about living with, suffering from, and dying from HIV. Then, I develop what I call Sera-positivity, which is a multi-layered, multi-valent sense of subjectivity that while predicated on a radical particularity/singularity can come to inherently represent a fluctuating democratic sense of universality yet one that does not seek to exercise exclusion and homogenization in its constitution. I also further develop risk of exposure as underlying this new mediation of sociality and citizenship so as to rethink freedom through \"post-AIDS\" queer democracy. Lastly, I develop a sense of intergenerational AIDS trauma by queering postmemory and examining queer gesture. In doing so, I develop the idea of reading as fucking by looking at parallels of risk, exposure, and contamination between HIV and knowledge itself. The act of reading and the act of sex, understood through a queer lens of gesture and genre, become blurred and offer a means to understand what AIDS trauma of the everyday actually was as well as how it has been transmitted over time. I also find that PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) has provided gay men with an opportunity to simultaneously combat the epidemic, alleviate AIDS trauma, and still hold space for new sexual projects. Ultimately, I conclude that the AIDS crisis was a virally imbued, passive genocide that created irrevocable changes in history, democracy, and emerging LGBT literature. I also conclude that despite the ongoing political projects of queers that come in the form of this very study, the current unfolding of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic stands in as empirical evidence itself that the shifts brought about by HIV have yet to be fully realized or taken seriously in any arena. Moving forward during an age of COVID-19 all the while still trying to combat the HIV pandemic, I hold open the space of reading the dissertation as an act that will hopefully transmit the necessary knowledge to participate in abating these diseases as much as the social stigmatization that has come along with them.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Contracting Subjectivities: Que(e)rying Gesture, Affect, and Politics in French and American AIDS Literature"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Young, Hershini","Comparative Literature"],"dc:creator":["Capps, Vincent"],"dc:date":["2025-02-21T21:36:48Z","2020"],"dc:description":["Ph.D.","In this study, I most broadly seek to examine what AIDS as a biomedical and sociopolitical crisis has meant for the institution of democracy, literature, and the project of queerness by looking through the specific lenses of gesture, affect, and politics. Through critical queer hermeneutics, I perform a comparative literary analysis of a selected body of AIDS writing from France and America. The secondary methodology I utilize is an experimental mimesis of (auto)fiction and (auto)theory that both primary and secondary queer writers under study here have explored in their projects as a means of cultivating their ideas. This project can overall also be classified as an affective arching gesture, a kind of bearing witness and a taking up of the queer political projects that many AIDS writers and activists began in response to their specific oppression. I first develop what I call Raw Writing, which simply defined is a genre or style of writing deployed by queer and seropositive individuals that utilized queer excess in the form of sex, the body, language, and drugs in order to both make intelligible new subjectivities brought about by HIV as well as to manifest or perform the very potentiality inherent to literature and the act of writing. Through my examination of raw writing, I begin my initial probing of exposure that begins with the rawness of literature that exposes readers to knowledge specifically about living with, suffering from, and dying from HIV. Then, I develop what I call Sera-positivity, which is a multi-layered, multi-valent sense of subjectivity that while predicated on a radical particularity/singularity can come to inherently represent a fluctuating democratic sense of universality yet one that does not seek to exercise exclusion and homogenization in its constitution. I also further develop risk of exposure as underlying this new mediation of sociality and citizenship so as to rethink freedom through \"post-AIDS\" queer democracy. Lastly, I develop a sense of intergenerational AIDS trauma by queering postmemory and examining queer gesture. In doing so, I develop the idea of reading as fucking by looking at parallels of risk, exposure, and contamination between HIV and knowledge itself. The act of reading and the act of sex, understood through a queer lens of gesture and genre, become blurred and offer a means to understand what AIDS trauma of the everyday actually was as well as how it has been transmitted over time. I also find that PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) has provided gay men with an opportunity to simultaneously combat the epidemic, alleviate AIDS trauma, and still hold space for new sexual projects. Ultimately, I conclude that the AIDS crisis was a virally imbued, passive genocide that created irrevocable changes in history, democracy, and emerging LGBT literature. I also conclude that despite the ongoing political projects of queers that come in the form of this very study, the current unfolding of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic stands in as empirical evidence itself that the shifts brought about by HIV have yet to be fully realized or taken seriously in any arena. Moving forward during an age of COVID-19 all the while still trying to combat the HIV pandemic, I hold open the space of reading the dissertation as an act that will hopefully transmit the necessary knowledge to participate in abating these diseases as much as the social stigmatization that has come along with them.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86717"],"dc:language":["eng"],"dc:publisher":["State University of New York at Buffalo"],"dc:rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"dc:subject":["sexuality","English literature","gender studies"],"dc:title":["Contracting Subjectivities: Que(e)rying Gesture, Affect, and Politics in French and American AIDS Literature"],"dc:type":["Text","Dissertation"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:34Z"}