Inverting Monstrosity: ACT UP’s Fight against Scientific-Popular Discourses of AIDS
Inverting Monstrosity: ACT UP’s Fight against Scientific-Popular Discourses of AIDS

Summary/Abstract: The ACT UP movement emerged in the late 1980s in the U.S. to fight the AIDS epidemic and draw public and state’s attention to it. One of the many things that distinguish this queer movement from others is the variety of visual strategies that were employed. In this paper, I focus on one of those strategies: i.e. how ACT UP criticized the movement’s political enemies in particular and biomedical politics in general in its own posters.By analyzing this visual discourse, I argue that ACT UP used the genre of monstrosity to counter homophobic scientific-popular discourses of AIDS that were demonizing gay men and constructing their image as monsters. I claim that such discursive confrontation of ACT UP were realized by deliberately employing visual strategy to appropriate the genre of monstrosity from those scientific-popular discourses. First, I will delineate these latter discourses before turning to the aspects of monstrosity and monstrous homosexuality. I will finish with a short analysis of ACT UP’s visual strategy of using posters to respond to popular-scientific discourses of AIDS.

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