The clinical gays and the painful reunion: Medical spectatorship and historiographical practice in new queer cinema

In identifying the terminological and conceptual movement of same-sex persons from the juridical to the clinical—and by extension from the momentarily wicked to the permanently diseased—Michel Foucault has famously stated: The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. i Inspired by this formulation, this dissertation considers the medical invention of the category of the homosexual (created within the same decade as the modern motion picture) in relation to what has been deemed homosexuality\u27s moment of liberation from medicine in the 1970s, when it was removed as a category of mental aberration in the DSM. With the rise of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in gay communities in the early 1980s, and the subsequent revival of scientific studies on gay etiology, I argue that homosexuals were forcibly returned to the medical sphere—a period I term the painful reunion. Reading a collection of queer films from the late 1980s and 1990s, I show that contemporaneous medical events prompted the mobilization of seropositive and queer artists to rehabilitate, revise, and offend the historiography of queer illness—from the perspectives of patient to doctor and in between. Collectively, my conclusions redefine our understandings of New Queer Cinema and queer theory as distinctively 1990s projects invested in the present to ones that purposefully aim to challenge the past. iMichel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980): 43