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The body of queer films and videos that have addressed AIDS pandemic over its two decade history resists any desire we may have for delineating well-defined aesthetic categories or clearcut historical trajectories. In fact, this body of work suffused with resistance on thematic, aesthetic, and political levels. Most significantly, queer films and videos resist and contest ideology of dominant media representation of pandemic, which has consistently pathologized queer bodies, stigmatized their pleasures and marginalized identities that coalesce around them. This overwhelming political imperative for queer media pushed its practitioners to reject notion of an avant-garde autonomous from both popular and political-the dominant paradigm for filmmaking during 1970s. While queer AIDS media certainly borrowed many aesthetic techniques from that period-including structuralist repetition, an increased use of text, and a self-reflexive concern with apparatus-many of its makers drew more practical inspiration from Soviet avant-garde of 1920s. They participated in larger practices of AIDS described by Alexandra Juhasz as the use of video production to form a local response to AIDS, to articulate a rebuttal to or a revision of mainstream media's definitions and representations of AIDS, and to form community around a new identity forced into existence by fact of AIDS.1 Due to proliferation of high-quality, low-cost video technology, video became dominant medium for alternative AIDS media, yet many makers moved back and forth between film and video. The aesthetic, theoretical, and institutional barriers maintaining divide between film and video were already beginning to break down in early 1980s. Questions over medium specificity simply seemed less important than urgent and specific issues over representation raised by AIDS crisis. Similarly, distinguishing a discrete body of experimental work within alternative AIDS media poses its own problems. The post-structuralist critique of representation that theoretically informed much alternative AIDS media encouraged widespread use of formal experimentation to deconstruct and transform documentary conventions, such as talking head and authoritative voice-over commentary. Thus generic distinction between and documentary works often becomes blurred in context of alternative AIDS media. Alternative AIDS media also challenged idea of film and video as primarily personal and artisanal forms of expression created in complete opposition to mass produced popular culture. The generation of film and videomakers producing alternative AIDS media were as much influenced by pop aesthetics of American Underground and by music video as they were by structuralist film and conceptual video. Such heterogeneity exists not only on level of aesthetic influence but also in terms of diverse uses made of form by alternative AIDS media. It can be seen in works dedicated to community organizing and safer sex education as well as in works more conventionally identified as experimental. Furthermore, alternative AIDS media demonstrated a promiscuous attitude toward distribution and exhibition, challenging longstanding identification of specific generic forms with particular institutional contexts. In analyzing queer film and video practices, I will trace three crucial aspects of AIDS representation with which they have consistently engaged throughout history of pandemic: discourse, voice, and body. AIDS, as Paula Treichler has indicated, is simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification.2 The film and video techniques of dense visual montage, verbal repetition, and sound/image disjuncture have proved particularly apt for interrogating powerful cacophony of scientific, political, and religious discourses which structure cultural representation of disease. …
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