Pauline Scholz is a doctoral candidate at the Research Training Group „Aesthetics of Democracy“ at Goethe University Frankfurt, supervised by Prof. Achim Geisenhanslüke. She did her B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature at this university, at Södertörn University Stockholm and at Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.

Her research follows the principles of a literary approach, which is additionally influenced interdisciplinarily by methods of art history, of philosophy and of film and media studies. Next to queer and feminist studies, her work is mainly concerned with holocaust studies, twentieth century German-language poetry, and translation theory.

HIV/AIDS — Democratizing Potential between Literature, Art and Activism?

My doctoral project forms the focal point of a multitude of problems. To begin with, it investigates the body as the space of experience of desire and of time — an HIV-positive, AIDS-infected, or dying body, whose positive test result served as a link to unprotected non-normative intercourse in the eyes of the public, and whose infection was linked to imminent death before the development of combination therapy (and even today, in many cases, due to a lack of resources). The body of an HIV-positive or AIDS-infected person thus exposes these elements of experience — time and desire — in a specific way.

Every expression of queer sexuality, every one of its sensibilities, which only gain in urgency in the context of the HIV/AIDS-epidemic, puts into question the heteronormative matrix. The radically shortened life span itself demolishes, on the one hand, the particular experience of time which determines the development of modern subjectivity, and, on the other hand, the concept of linear temporality which our positive belief in progress is based on. The HIV/AIDS-crises at the end of the twentieth century therefore is an inconceivable catastrophe for the affected. Yet it also brings to light the suppressed inadequacies of precisely the ideals, which have become crucial components of those societies considering themselves liberal democracies.

At this exact point I want to start my work. My dissertation examines literary texts, interprets works of art, and considers activist movements in the United States and South Africa, and asks: what democratizing potential can emerge from these aesthetic forms in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Which perspectives can they open up to contrive of a new, more flexible, open and sustainable understanding of democracy? How, finally, could thinking and living look in terms of that which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls „queer possibility“?