Revisiting HIV/AIDS in French Culture

Loïc Bourdeau is associate professor of French and francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.V. Hunter Capps is postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Revisiting Sites of Rawness, Queerness, and VulnerabilityLoïc Bourdeau and V. Hunter CappsChapter One: Transmitting It: Rawness and the Politics of HIV/AIDS Witnessing TodayDavid CaronChapter Two: Raw Writing: AIDS Autofiction and the Construction of Seropositive SubjectivityV. Hunter CappsChapter Three: Kindling Kinships: Sexual Citizenship and Queer Constructions of Masculinity in the Works of Erik RémèsDaniel. N. MarounChapter Four: Covering Up: Condomless Sex, (Ir)responsibility, and Risk in FranceBrian TrothChapter Five: “C’est Votre Choix” or, Private Identities and Public Militancy in the Second Decade of the AIDS Epidemic in France: The Case of Gay Porn Magazine Projet XJoão FlorêncioChapter Six: Viral Dances: Moving in Times of a PandemicLucille TothChapter Seven: State of Sexual Exception: SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and Sexual Citizenship in Pandemic TimesCJ GomolkaChapter Eight: Interview with Nicholas Giguère and Kevin Lambert

Such a well-conceived, trenchant, carefully balanced collection. These essays explicitly interrogate the Western "response to" — better termed, engagements with — HIV/AIDS and its contingencies, rebooting our knowledge and assumptions about all the topics it brings to the fore: social divisions, the ontology of politics and risk, cultural transfer, and the ongoing public trial of sex. From theory to public education, from hardcore porn to dance and TikTok, a treasury of materials bespeaks the impact these struggles have made on our culture, as these essays and interviews rove gracefully but probingly through it. The specifics of language, national contexts, and the vexed positions of gay writing thread deftly and provocatively through these compelling texts.