Object of the Study
started to work as an activist and help Ned Weeks with his campaign for gay people to stop having sex. They receive a lot of provocation and disbelieve
from their own people. After a couple of months, gay people kept on dying. Ned Weeks was provoked by this and the gay liberation movement and AIDS
awareness are him and his colleagues‘ main focus for the rest of the story
New York, along with San Francisco, and Los Angeles, became the ground zero of the first wave of AIDS epidemic. At that time, there was a
believe that AIDS could eradicate the entire population of homosexual men and the gay community. In the play, one of the problem that faced by
homosexual men is how the AIDS campaign had a clash with the gay liberation a decade back.
Gay men are intensely urban and only a few of them that lives in a country free by choice on a permanent basis. Most of them live in a city because of the
variety that city offers them to enjoy one‘s live. Based on the play, the setting of the place is at New York. The famed city is also known for the violent
demonstration that occurs in 1969 that widely considered as the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and became the early
stages of the LGBT rights movement. In 2014, The Normal Heart was adopted to a movie with the same title and receive a hugely amount of positive reaction
from all layers of the society. Most of the actors who involves with the movie
itself are publicly open gay. B.
Approach of the Study
This study uses cultural studies approach because it is focused on the finding and questioning of the historical impacts it brings to layers of society
throughout the literary text. Queer theory tackles many queer related issues and the researcher will focus more on the rise of the queer politics. According
to Michael Warner Warner, 1993:7 Queers live not only to engage coitus with partners, but it implies that they want to have a ―mark‖ in the world.
Since the HIVAIDS and The Stonewall Riot taken its place in the world, gay people started to emerge from its closeted world. According to Berlant and
Warner, Warner, 1998: 547 the sexual convention in society i.e. pornographic videos, phone sex, etc. are all related to heterosexuality, but
what if the sex acts are not in your usual and conventional ways. The world of politics in queer view can be seen through that same glasses. The contextual
approach of this study also can be seen explicitly on the details that surrounds the play with the actual events that occurred during the HIV crisis of New
York. It is a form of protest and message to the people worldwide that related with LGBTQ rights. Another approach that the researcher use is cultural
studies approach. ―Arising from the social turmoil of the 7960s, cultural Studies is
composed of elements of Marxism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies,
film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces
that either create community or cause division and alienation.‖ Guerin: 2005,
276
Which means that cultural studies can be derived from many form of theory and studies. The bottom line of this epic study is to focus on social and
cultural idea which eventually created diversity. For this undergraduate thesis, the researcher uses Queer theory, labeling theory, and socio- cultural
background. It is not a single, standardized approach to literature or anything
else but a field that binds its adherents through some common interests and purposes, although they are addressed in widely divergent ways.
―The intent is to connect historical, social, and economic knowledge surrounding the topic, a topic that may not seem to be very literary at all.
Because any context is virtually unending, the critic never knows enough. As a result, interpretations made from a cultural studies perspective tend to be
opened and continue to evolve as they are affected by new information. ‖
Dobie: 2012, 175
Another point of interest quoted from Dobie is the intention of Cultural Studies itself which is to connect historical and social knowledge in The
Normal Heart. Cultural Studies can help the researcher for the reinterpretation of the play from an open perspective.