Fighting AIDS with Theory: AIDS Activism, Queer Theory, and the Institutionalization of Gay and Lesbian Studies

Despite early efforts in the 1970s, gay and lesbian studies did not exist as a distinct interdiscipline in U.S. colleges and universities until the late 1980s, more than a decade after the institutionalization of fields like women’s studies, African-American studies, and Ethnic studies.This paper looks at the development of research centers (such as CLAGS), journals (such as GLQ), book series (such as Series Q), and a short-lived but significant national conference that mark the field’s debut in colleges and universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I demonstrate, first, how the AIDS crisis and AIDS activism served as a major impetus for the development of the field and, second, how gay and lesbian studies was shaped by the strong influence of poststructural theory across the humanities, contributing to the ascendancy of queer theory and the eventual rebranding of “gay and lesbian studies” as “queer studies.” In examining the dual influence of HIV/AIDS and postructuralist theory, I unpack a set of competing impulses that laid the groundwork for the field as it exists today. On the one hand, some founding figures advocated for gay and lesbian studies as a strategy for combating social homophobia during the AIDS crisis, often incidentally favoring cutting edge theory in a bid for institutional legitimacy. For others, theory offered a key strategy for making sense of the world at a moment when, to quote Thomas Yingling’s posthumously published essay, the AIDS crisis “defeat[ed] our usual academic practice of careful, inclusive analysis” (1991, 292). In sum, this paper offers a history of how theory came to be associated with political urgency during the founding moment of gay and lesbian studies and how these associations continue to linger in queer studies today.