Phenomenology of HIV in Danez Smith's Poetry

Toni R. Juncosa, who was a predoctoral researcher at ADHUC, will defend his doctoral thesis titled Of Fear of Hope: In Phenomenology of HIV at Danez Smith, co-supervised by Dr. Rodrigo Andrés and Dr. Cristina Alsina (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona). Published in 2017, Danez Smith’s Forward Prize-winning poetry collection Don’t Call Us Dead explores the experience of being diagnosed with HIV. Despite the medical advances, Smith’s work is imbued with a set of imagery evoking death and decay. So, how to explain the persistence of this supposedly outdated association between HIV and AIDS? What role may Smith’s social position, as a queer, Black American, play in the association of HIV to AIDS seen in their work? In this dissertation, Toni R. Juncosa delves into a phenomenology of HIV in the 21^st century based on comparative close-readings of Danez Smith’s poetry. While most literary analyses of HIV and AIDS literature approach the experience of contagion through trauma and stigma, Juncosa is interested in exploring the hope and joy that shine through in Smith’s work in spite of the fatalistic imagery, considering the possibility to experience an HIV-positive diagnosis optimistically. Focusing on the perceptive experience of HIV and how it might evolve over time, Juncosa reads Smith’s poems in chronological contrast, bearing in mind the year of publication and the position of each piece within the volume, but giving most importance to whether the speaker’s perspective in each poem is pre- or postdiagnosis. Toni R. Juncosa suggests that there is a narrative arc spanning Danez Smith’s poetry, from pre-diagnosis fear of contagion in the first collection, [insert] boy (2014), through post-diagnosis fear of developing AIDS and becoming ill in the second collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, to ambivalent acceptance of the virus, to embrace, thankfulness, and even love for it in the third collection, Homie (2020). To do so, he draws from literary theory (Augier, Bachelard, Felski, Fuss, Ramazani, Sacks, Spargo), as well as Afropessimism (Douglass & Wilderson, Melton, Sexton, Warren), queer theory (Ahmed, Butler, Berlant, Love, Muñoz, Snediker), HIV and AIDS historiography (Basu, Castiglia & Reed, Cheng et al., Cvetkovich, Schulman) and phenomenology (Esposito, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, Spillers), among other sources, to shed light on HIV as a flexible ontological experience in the pharmaceutical context of a 21st-century global North.