AIDS narrative(s) of promiscuous care. Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” (1986) revisited
Abstract
This paper sets out to revisit Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) through an interdisciplinary methodology, combining literary studies with queer studies and scholarship on the cultural representation of AIDS. An analysis of the story and the literary mechanisms through which it is constructed will be offered, as well as an exploration of the queer community of promiscuous care portrayed in it and the possibilities that queer writing offers as a tool for world-making. Moreover, the paper provides a critical view of AIDS and Its Metaphors, contrasting Sontag’s fictional work on AIDS with her more famous, and yet problematic, essayistic work on the subject. In turn, this comparative approach will help to reconsider the role of literary narrative in the production, previous and ongoing, of discourses on HIV/AIDS to demonstrate how this creative resource can create a counter-hegemonic discourse on AIDS still pertinent today through this new critic reassessment of Sontag’s piece(s).
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