AIDS and the New Medical Gaze

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Abstract
The essay argues that the contemporary resurgence of homophobia and the remedicalization of homosexuals in the wake of AIDS is, in part, an unintended but predictable effect of a quarter century of fractious identity-politics. Prominent gay and lesbian political strategies of the 1970s and 1980s borrowed heavily from increasingly discredited, if once politically correct, discourses that valorized individuals on the basis of membership in governmentally constructed bio-bureaucratic categories. Drawing on the work of prominent gay intellectuals, such as Foucault, Watney, and Richard Rodriguez, and locating their insights within the context of contemporary cultural and political conflicts, the essay argues that gay advocates who essentialize homosexual identity, however benignly, unwittingly participate in constituting the ground for an emergence of a neoeugenic movement at millennium's end. The essay concludes with the observation that escaping the conceptual prison of bio-bureaucratic categories is not a uniquely gay or lesbian task. It is a human task.

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