| This thesis, situated in dialogue with previous critical work on AIDS, medico-scientific discourse, and dissident sexualities, both documents and engages with medico-scientific discourses around homosexuality and AIDS in Canada during the first decade of the epidemic (1981-1990). By focussing on medico-scientific discourses located in what are almost exclusively professional journals, my analysis demonstrates the ways in which the production of medico-scientific knowledge is already an intensely socially constructed process, mediated by political, professional, religious, moral and societal elements with which it has a reciprocal relationship. In prying open medical discourses about AIDS in Canada, I demonstrate not only the degree to which the narratives of medicine are implicated in the construction of contested sexual subjectivities, but also the pressures placed upon the identity of the medical profession itself through the challenges posed to medical metanarratives by the contestations around the meanings of AIDS, sexual difference, and the hierarchies of both medical and sexual knowledge. |
