AIDS and American Apocalypticism

AIDS and American Apocalypticism PDF Author: Thomas Lawrence Long
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148467X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to the medical crisis, prevent the spread of the disease, and treat the HIV infected. Using the analytical tools of literary analysis, cultural studies, performance theory, and social semiotics, AIDS and American Apocalypticism examines many kinds of discourse, including fiction, drama, performance art, demonstration graphics and brochures, biomedical publications, and journalism and shows that, while initially useful, the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric in the long term are dangerous. Among the important figures in AIDS activism and the arts discussed are David Drake, Tim Miller, Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushner, as well as the organizations ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers.

AIDS and American Apocalypticism

AIDS and American Apocalypticism PDF Author: Thomas Lawrence Long
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148467X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to the medical crisis, prevent the spread of the disease, and treat the HIV infected. Using the analytical tools of literary analysis, cultural studies, performance theory, and social semiotics, AIDS and American Apocalypticism examines many kinds of discourse, including fiction, drama, performance art, demonstration graphics and brochures, biomedical publications, and journalism and shows that, while initially useful, the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric in the long term are dangerous. Among the important figures in AIDS activism and the arts discussed are David Drake, Tim Miller, Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushner, as well as the organizations ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers.

AIDS as an Apocalyptic Metaphor in North America

AIDS as an Apocalyptic Metaphor in North America PDF Author: Susan J. Palmer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In a single decade, AIDS has grown to pandemic proportions. The combined forces of medical research and public education have thus far failed to halt the spread of the disease, which remains mysterious, stigmatizing, and fatal. In this highly original study, Susan Palmer explores the healing practices, metaphors, and apocalyptic fantasies of various religious, racial, and sexual minority groups as they respond to the AIDS threat.Palmer looks at the response to AIDS by specific groups as diverse as white and black identity movements, gay spirituality circles, communal and millenarian cults, and sci-fi and horror films. Her study reveals a proliferation of AIDS metaphors that refer variously to medieval plagues, social disorder, decline of the nuclear family, and supernatural powers. She argues that the human body tends to become a symbol that mirrors the social body, and she finds this process especially dramatic in persecuted marginal groups.Well known as a researcher and writer on new religious movements in Europe and North America, Susan Palmer brings experience and insight to this study of the metaphors surrounding alternative spirituality and sexuality.

Infrastructures of Apocalypse

Infrastructures of Apocalypse PDF Author: Jessica Hurley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

Immigration and Apocalypse

Immigration and Apocalypse PDF Author: Yii-Jan Lin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300280483
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Tracing the metaphor of America as the Book of Revelation’s New Jerusalem, Yii-Jan Lin shows how apocalyptic narratives have been used to exclude unwanted immigrants America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Explorers and colonizers imagined the land to be paradise, the New Jerusalem of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. This groundbreaking volume explores the conceptualization of America as the New Jerusalem from the time of Columbus to the Puritan colonists, through U.S. expansion, and from the eras of Reagan to Trump. While the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. Yii-Jan Lin shows how newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history have used the language of Revelation to define immigrants as God’s enemies who must be shut out of the gates. This book exposes Revelation’s apocalyptic logic at work in the history of Chinese exclusion, the association of the unwanted with disease, the contradictions of citizenship laws, and the justification for building a U.S.-Mexico wall like the wall around the New Jerusalem. This book is a fascinating analysis of the religious, biblical, and apocalyptic in American immigration history and a damning narrative that weaves together American religious history, immigration and ethnic studies, and the use of biblical texts and imagery.

Wisdom Commentary: Revelation

Wisdom Commentary: Revelation PDF Author: Lynn R. Huber
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 081468209X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
While feminist interpretations of the Book of Revelation often focus on the book’s use of feminine archetypes—mother, bride, and prostitute, this commentary explores how gender, sexuality, and other feminist concerns permeate the book in its entirety. By calling audience members to become victors, Revelation’s author, John, commends to them an identity that flows between masculine and feminine and challenges ancient gender norms. This identity befits an audience who follow the Lamb, a genderqueer savior, wherever he goes. In this commentary, Lynn R. Huber situates Revelation and its earliest audiences in the overlapping worlds of ancient Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and first-century Judaism. She also examines how interpreters from different generations living within other worlds have found meaning in this image-rich and meaning-full book.

Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing NIP

Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing NIP PDF Author: Patricia D'Antonio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135049750
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! 2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing’s Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing! The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work and worth of nursing in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research into the history of nursing moves us away from a reductionist focus on diseases and treatments and towards more inclusive ideas about the experiences of illnesses on individuals, families, communities, voluntary organizations, and states at the bedside and across the globe. An extended introduction by the editors provides an overview and analyzes the key themes involved in the transmission of ideas about the care of the sick. Organized into four parts, and addressing nursing around the globe, it covers: New directions in the history of nursing; New methodological approaches; The politics of nursing knowledge; Nursing and its relationship to social practice. Exploring themes of people, practice, politics and places, this cutting edge volume brings together the best of nursing history scholarship, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field, and is also relevant to those studying on nursing history and health policy courses.

On the Meaning of Friendship Between Gay Men

On the Meaning of Friendship Between Gay Men PDF Author: Andrew R. Gottlieb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135696160
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
On the Meaning of Friendship Between Gay Men takes readers beyond a traditional exploration of gay sexuality and romantic relationships, into the realm of recognizing the importance of friendship to gay men.

Divided Worlds? Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies

Divided Worlds? Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies PDF Author: Caroline Johnson Hodge
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1628375477
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability. Contributors include Douglas Boin, Denise Kimber Buell, Gay L. Byron, Allen Dwight Callahan, Joy Connolly, Jennifer A. Glancy, Shelley P. Haley, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Katherine Lu Hsu, Timothy Joseph, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Dominic Machado, Joseph A. Marchal, Thomas R. Martin, Candida R. Moss, Laura Salah Nasrallah, Jorunn Økland, and Abraham Smith.

The Babylon Complex

The Babylon Complex PDF Author: Erin Runions
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823257363
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. Political citations of Babylon range widely, from torture at Abu Ghraib to depictions of Hollywood glamour and decadence. In political discourse, Babylon appears in conservative ruminations on democratic law, liberal appeals to unity, Tea Party warnings about equality, and religious advocacy for family values. A composite biblical figure, Babylon is used to celebrate diversity and also to condemn it, to sell sexuality and to regulate it, to galvanize war and to worry about imperialism. Erin Runions explores the significance of these shifts and contradictions, arguing that together they reveal a theopolitics that tries to balance the drive for U.S. dominance with the countervailing ideals and subjectivities of economic globalization. Examining the confluence of cultural formations, biblical interpretations, and (bio)political philosophies, The Babylon Complex shows how theopolitical arguments for war, sexual regulation, and political control both assuage and contribute to anxieties about waning national sovereignty. Theoretically sophisticated and engaging, this remarkable book complicates our understanding of how the Bible affects U.S political ideals and subjectivities.

American Apocalyptic

American Apocalyptic PDF Author: Juli L. Gittinger
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031561600
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description