Re-Visiting AIDS and Queerness in Contemporary Young Adult Literature

Abstract

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the AIDS crisis began one of the darkest chapters in the history of the LGBTQ+ community, as the already stigmatized community suffered the epidemic's effects and encountered further layers of discrimination. The AIDS crisis had a tremendous social impact: many were lost and mourned. But despite being an age marked by despair, the period also witnessed the birth of a loving and dedicated community. Since then, different authors have recreated this crisis in their works, but the representation of the AIDS crisis in Young Adult (YA) fiction has been more limited and often endowed with a didactic purpose aimed at reinforcing forms of normative heterosexuality by highlighting the dangers posed by queer identities. Departing from these considerations, the aim of this dissertation is to examine how the AIDS crisis has been revisited in recent works of YA fiction which celebrate, rather than condemn, gender and sexual diversity. To this end, the study will provide an overview of how this crisis has been represented in YA literature with queer themes and it will then move on to provide a clase reading of two contemporary novels: David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing (2013) and Abdi Nazemian's Like a Love Story (2019). Accordingly, the study will be divided into two main parts. In the first one, I shall lay bare the critical apparatus that will inform the subsequent analysis of the novels, reviewing critica! works on queer studies and showing how these theories have influenced the representation of queer identities in YA. A retrospective of the HIV crisis, plus its depiction in literature, will also be included in this section. The second part of the study will be centered on a clase reading of Like a Love Story and Two Boys Kissing, focusing on the different strategieseach of them uses to revisit the past and create a collective memory while simultaneously celebrating the existence of different gender and sexual identities.