Castrating Intimacy: HIV, Masculinity and Intimacy in Contemporary Gay Literature

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the continued presence of anxieties around HIV/AIDS in contemporary gay texts, depictions that derive from a cultural moment that sees a widespread incitement to historicize and memorialize the epidemic. I contend that HIV/AIDS has come to represent something that is unbearable within the cultural imaginary and argue that this can be traced to how HIV/AIDS is racialized and feminized. Utilizing a Freudian psychoanalytic framework and close readings of four texts, Édouard Louis’ The End of Eddy (2014) and History of Violence (2016), Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (2016) and Bryan Washington’s “Waugh” (2018), I claim that HIV/AIDS figure in these texts as an anxiety over masculinity, the body and the self. This thesis argues that the anxiety over masculinity, as represented in these texts, is largely oriented around a perception of the other as potentially castrating. This is because they represent the threat of fracturing the boundary separating the masculinized body against its constitutive others, who are perceived as racialized, feminized and socially and economically dependent. These anxieties are highly bound to anal penetration as representing a fundamental entry of the other into the self. I suggest that this is symbolically associated with HIV, and I introduce the concept “castrating intimacy” to encapsulate how relationality, gender and bodily ability are represented as threatened by the other. I argue that these anxieties can be traced back to an understanding of HIV/AIDS as rendering the body vulnerable and thus dependent on others, including one’s immediate material context. I furthermore argue that these anxieties rely on conceptions of private property and individualism that constructs femininity as a form of dependability. In the conclusion, I consider these texts as determined by a form of textual prophylaxis. Castration, I argue, lingers as an expectation the text is written to prevent. I suggest the need for a new textual form and politics that does not seek to prevent the intrusion of the other, but rather understand the specific, geographic, structural failures that impede the mobility of the subject.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	David Alderson (Supervisor) & Monica Pearl (Supervisor)