AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

CONTENTS

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION Where Does AIDS Come from? 3 Metaphors of Science 4 Two Models of Health and Disease 10 French Novels and the Construction of Otherness 13 CHAPTER 1 Degeneracy and Inversion: The Male Homosexual as Internal Other 17 The Discourse of Dégénérescence 18 Inventing the Male “Homosexual” 22 Literature as Medicine, or Medicine as Literature? 27 CHAPTER 2 Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety: Outing Zola 31 Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel 32 Naturalism as Heterosexuality 43 Queering Napoleon III? 49 The Rambling Degenerate and the Instability of Authorship 53 CHAPTER 3 Reclaiming Disease and Infection: Jean Genet and the Politics of the Border 62 Disease, Vermin, and Abjection 65 Crossing Metaphorical Borders, or Contaminating Language 80 Literal Borders 85 vii CHAPTER 4 A Cultural History of AIDS Discourse: France and the United States 96 What AIDS Criticism? 96 AIDS Representations 98 Constructing the AIDS Sufferer 105 CHAPTER 5 AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity: The Example of Hervé Guibert 112 Hervé Guibert 113 Returning the Doctor’s Gaze 119 The Diseased Subject 132 The Discourse of Disease and the Disease of Discourse 135 Gossip, Rumors, and the Margins of Modernity 139 CONCLUSION French Universalism and the Question of Community 149 NOTES 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 183 INDEX 197 viii S Contents ...