The Obsessive Body: David B. Feinberg's Attempts at Distance While Facing the AIDS Epidemic

Abstract

The paper focuses on the role of the body in the production of New York author David B. Feinberg. Through an analysis of his fiction and non-fiction, we will see how the author continuously employed the theme of the body in order to deal with the traumatic experience of the AIDS epidemic. We will see how Feinberg’s three books, Eighty-sixed, Spontaneous Combustion, and Queer and Loathing each represent a crucial phase in the author’s relationship with the disease which also affected him, and ultimately killed him in 1994. By focusing on the theme of the body, we will see how Feinberg’s work is employed both as a way to provoke readers and spark a reaction from the public, and to allow him to deal with the trauma of living as a gay man during the epidemic. Through the main theme of the body, the paper focuses on a few key concepts, such as the stigma attached to PWAs (people with AIDS), the employment of humor in the context of the tragic, the obscenity of human corpses displayed as symbols of protests, politically incorrect behavior, the subversion sparked by a sick person proactively reclaiming his own narrative. Throughout the article, we will see how the theme of cleanliness, in particular, is employed to negotiate with the paranoia caused by the landscape of the epidemic, and how, in general, Feinberg’s work holds a prominent place in the landscape of AIDS literature.