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Plague of Pariahs: AIDS 'Zines and the Rhetoric of Transgression

Mainstream AIDS activists in the 1980s responded to demonizing and stigmatizing representations of the HIV infected by attempting to "normalize" people living with AIDS. However, some gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s, catalyzed by antigay politics since the late 1970s and overwhelmed by the excessively apocalyptic and overdetermined representations of AIDS in popular media, deliberately embraced the role of sexual and medical pariah, celebrated social anxieties about their public danger as vectors of infection, and repudiated the sympathetically sentimentalizing images of "AIDS victims." Adopting the rhetoric of punk culture and its forms of self-representation—particularly the punk rock-derived "fanzine" or "'zine"—these "infected faggots" and "diseased pariahs" exposed and celebrated their HIV status and erotic adventurism. However, the writers, editors, and publishers of AIDS 'zines contended with the competing claims of performative self-representation, on one hand, and of a readership, on the other. The result in such 'zines as Infected Faggot Perspectives and Diseased Pariah News was a continuous crisis of self-representation evident even in the format and technology of the 'zines print publication and circulation.

Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4, 401-411 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/0196859900024004004


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