“The Symbol of My Condition”: Dynamics of Alignment with Power in Sarah Schulman’s „Rat Bohemia”

Abstract

This article considers how Sarah Schulman in her novel Rat Bohemia and other works utilizes her intersectional position as a Jewish lesbian writer to bear witness to her experience of AIDS epidemic. It analyzes how Schulman represents family as an institution of power to hold it accountable for the spread of AIDS epidemic in the context of her postmemory of Holocaust. It deals also with mechanisms of alignment with power within the gay community itself. Finally, it focuses on the central symbol of rats in Rat Bohemia understood as an indexical sign of the obscene. All these issues are theorized in the context of the problem of witnessing as strategies to write a testimony that remains loyal to the community and the reality of a crisis event.