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Cold War Science and the Body Politic: An Immuno/Virological Approach to Angels in America
- Literature and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 2000
- pp. 241-261
- 10.1353/lm.2000.0030
- Article
- Additional Information
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Tony Kushner deploys discourses of immunology, virology, and politics in Angels in America to depathologize homosexuality and AODS. In the 1940s and 1950s, immunology and virology became saturated with a Cold War consciousness as they drew upon medical fears of illness that paralleled politcal fears of communist infiltration and invasion. These fears manifested themselves in the identification of communisits and homosexuals as diseased elements of an otherwise healthy American body politics. By depicting the effects of AIDS on several homosexuals in New York City in the mid-1980s, including Joseph MacCarthy's right hand man, Roy Cohn, Kushner calls attention to the shared Cold War metaphors of McCarthyism, immunology, and virology, and revises those metaphors in the age of AIDS.