HAART Times

: HIV/AIDS and the More-than-Human in American Literature post-1996

Abstract

The commercialisation of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) in 1996 was a watershed event in efforts to tackle the AIDS crisis. Despite this, HIV/AIDS remains a critical issue in the United States, as evidenced by disproportionately high infection rates among queer people of colour, ongoing discrimination, and the long-lasting impacts of the crisis. These issues risk the reversal of advancements and is perceptible in ever-increasing new infection rates and deepening inequalities.

Contemporary HIV/AIDS scholarship has indicated that an interface with the more-than-human can play a significant role in improving HIV prognostics, contribute to lowering viral loads and, in turn, reduce morbidity rates. In his 1991 memoir, Modern Nature, Derek Jarman already established a direct connection between his experiences of life with HIV/AIDS and the desolate landscape of Dungeness. Although this connection has largely been overlooked by scholars in wider HIV/AIDS literature, I contend that the non-human is pivotal in the articulation of HIV/AIDS subjectivities in contemporary texts. Employing Cate Sandilands’s concept of queer ecological subjectivity, I map the novel relationships that emerge between viral body-minds and more-than-human entities. These relationships, I argue, facilitate a broader challenge to heteronormative capitalist systems that enable the flourishing of queer identities.

The first chapter examines memoirs by Jan Zita Grover and Mark Doty. I argue that the authors’ embrace of desolate landscapes paradoxically helps them reconcile with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. The second chapter analyses how poets Danez Smith and Jericho Brown use non-human elements to reject chrononormative temporalities and forms of embodiment, and thus confront state-sanctioned mechanisms of marginalisation, abuse, and exploitation. The third chapter addresses Carol Rifka Brunt’s, Rabih Alameddine’s, and Torrey Peters’s novels. These texts revisit the legacy of the AIDS crisis and, as I explain, envision the embodied potential that viral body-minds and the more-than-human encapsulate by engaging with different more-than-human entities.

By reading these works, I explore how emerging queer ecological subjectivities foster radical communities, care, and new embodied temporalities, and ultimately offer us a glimpse of a pre-eminently queer future beyond HIV/AIDS.

Date of Award	17 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Andrew M Blades (Supervisor) & Maria Vaccarella (Supervisor)