Positive Images

Positive Images should be commended for the way it astutely locates the ongoing and unresolved political consequences of the AIDS epidemic in the singularities of the moving image. Not only does Kagan give us insight into a mode of popular media production working to discipline our contact with queer histories of this crisis - the most destructive example of institutionally sanctioned homophobia in the recent history of the US, UK, and Australia - but he also expertly shows the particular capaciousness of using cinema as a tool for thinking through - and evidencing - such discursive regulation. * Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies * In this landmark study of the representation of gay men in contemporary popular culture, Dion Kagan shows how the panicked response to AIDS during the 1980s continues to haunt post-crisis gay life, unsettling its normalisation by resuscitating the association of homosexuality with death and disease. In a series of carefully elaborated case studies drawn from the mainstream media and informed by feminist and queer theory, Kagan traces the transformation of HIV/AIDS into a signifier of social and sexual backwardness that conflicts with the normative aspirations of neoliberal gay identities. -- Robert J. Corber, William R. Kenan Jr, Professor in American Institutions and Values, Trinity College, Connecticut, USA In this erudite analysis of representations of Western gay life in postcrisis times, Dion Kagan re-activates the critical energies of early HIV cultural analysis for contemporary queer theory to ask what a positive image of gay life could possibly be in the current polarised environment that lurches between progressive attachments to clean, upstanding, respectable, sexless marrying types and the sensationalised monsters of chemsex, barebacking, HIV-positive sex and sex addiction, each of which emerge as figures of a retrograde sexuality we should have grown out of by now that effectively serve to re-crisis the present. Generous and expansive in its critical engagements, while sparkling throughout with astute and perceptive readings, Positive Images is a remarkable feat of intergenerational queer kinship that introduces an exciting new voice in sexuality scholarship. -- Kane Race, Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia