Abstract
'Constructing Gay Identities and Communities through Literary Style in French Gay AIDS Literature between 1989 and 1999' investigates the way literary style creates identity and community in literature. Even though style has been used to analyze a (shared) identity outside literature, this knowledge has not found its way back into literary analyses. At the same time, (gay) identity and community are central to contemporary French debate. Between 1989 and 1999 different authors transformed their experiences in literature, hereby focusing on the life of gay men in contemporary France during the AIDS crisis. Focusing on such a short period of time allows a thorough analysis of the way style constructs identities and communities. My research starts with the idea that identity and community consist of different shared objects, for example a shared music genre, a specific interpretation of a film or a shared canon of authors. These shared objects also share a style, and by mentioning them the authors make a stylistic choice. An overview of the multiple interpretations of the notion 'style' does not yet exist, which is a gap that my research bridges. Moreover, my research creates a cartograph of different gay identities and communities as they are represented in the literary works of my corpus. By means of this cartograph, my research responds to generalizations of queer critics and conservatives.
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