i Dion Kagan is an early career academic and arts writer who works on literature, film, gender and popular culture. He has lectured in gender, sexuality, screen and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Research Centre for Sex, Health and Society, LaTrobe University. His essays and reviews have been published widely in literary journals and magazines, including the Australian Book Review and The Lifted Brow. ii ‘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 n eoliberal gay identities’. Robert J. Corber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor in American Institutions and Values, Trinity College, Connecticut ‘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 iii Library of Gender and Popular Culture From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steam- punk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This new series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture engaging with a variety of texts – drawn primarily from Art, fashion TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies – as a way of considering various models for understanding the complimentary relationship between ‘gender identities’ and ‘popular culture’. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series will adopt a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural ‘products’. For further information or enquiries, please contact the library series editors: Claire Nally:
[email protected] Angela Smith:
[email protected] Advisory Board: Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK Prof Åsa Kroon, Örebro University, Sweden Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK iv Published and forthcoming titles: Ageing Femininity on Film: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema Niall Richardson All- American TV Crime Drama: Law and Ord