Devotion, and the queer body in elegy: two approaches

The study explores how the elegy has developed in line with the explicit acknowledgment of queer lives, and how the interventions of two American poets – Mark Doty and Marie Howe – are particularly significant, and deeply different from one another in their aesthetics. The argument contends that these poets offer aesthetic innovations in their poems which regard those dying from the HIV/AIDS virus, and do so in a way that contributes a new understanding to the genre of elegy: that queer elegy must find meaning where non-queer elegy has not.

This thesis contends that to elegise the legions of dead from the HIV/AIDS crisis successfully, and to go beyond testimony, the poet has to subvert or alter elegiac form. The introduction explores the widespread anti-AIDS and anti-queer stigma which was prevalent in North America at that time. It endeavours to explore how these sentiments are culturally constructed, and how AIDS itself is a virus constructed and understood linguistically as well as biomedically.