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100 _aJohan Andersson
_945387
245 _aHomonormative aesthetics: AIDS and ‘de-generational unremembering’ in 1990s London
260 _bSage,
_c2019.
300 _aVol 56, Issue 14, 2019,(2993-3010 p.)
520 _aThis article historically contextualises the origins of a transnational gay male aesthetic many now think of as homonormative. While typically understood as a depoliticisation that ‘recodes freedom and liberation in terms of privacy, domesticity, and consumption’ (Manalansan, 2005: 142), homonormativity also has an associated look defined by a set of slick surface appearances relating both to the body and design. Recognisable in various locations across the globe and in multiple settings including cruise ships, resorts, and gyms, this aesthetic is, above all, associated with gaybourhoods and gay villages. Using Soho’s gay village in London as a case-study of the emergence of this generic style in the 1990s, its branded emphasis on ‘affluence’, minimalist interior design and idealised gym bodies is contextualised with references to yuppification and AIDS. Constituting a ‘clean break’ with earlier forms of urban gay culture now stigmatised as ‘dirty’ and ‘unhealthy’, the homonormative aesthetic can be viewed as an example of ‘de-generational unremembering’ following the first traumatic phase of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s (Castiglia C and Reed C (2011) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9). By placing AIDS at the centre of a discussion of homonormativity, some of the assumptions about its privilege can be queried while at the same time maintaining a critique of how class-specific ‘aspirational’ imagery was deployed to detract from the stigma of the health crisis.
650 _aAIDS,
_945409
650 _abuilt environment,
_939154
650 _acommunity,
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650 _acreativity,
_930202
650 _aculture,
_945411
650 _adisplacement,
_945412
650 _a gentrification,
_945413
650 _a London,
_945414
650 _a sexuality
_945415
650 _agender,
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773 0 _011188
_915499
_dsage, 2019.
_tUrban studies
856 _uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018806149
942 _2ddc
_cART