Please join us for a Work-In-Progress lunch with Jonathan D. Katz, Visiting Associate Professor; Director, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, SUNY, Buffalo

Paper Title: How AIDS Changed American Art: Sex and the Gendering of Postmodernism

Discussant: Heather Love, English and APC/GSWS Core Faculty

Discussant: Sharrona Pearl, Annenberg and APC/GSWS Core Faculty

In place of AIDS' familiar role as a tragic tangent to the development of American culture--as a literal dead end--Katz argues that AIDS has in fact been one of the most powerful shaping forces in American art since the 1980’s. Of course, we have repressed AIDS’ role in the making of our culture in keeping with our longstanding repression of AIDS in general. But repression, as we know from psychoanalysis, is the sign of great power. Katz illustrates how AIDS has fundamentally shifted the American cultural landscape, exploring not only the manifold losses AIDS has inflicted, but also how, in response to both AIDS and the prejudice it engendered, a plague has rewritten both the form and content of American art.