Analysis Of 'Kissing Doesn' T Kill And Manuel Otero's Nobility Of Blood

The similar controversial natures of Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill and Manuel Ramos Otero’s “Nobility of Blood” suggest that perhaps their intended audiences may have shared characteristics as well. Because Kissing Doesn’t Kill is a piece of poster art, it was displayed out in the public, instead of a museum or convention like usual pieces of art. The poster was plastered in large sizes to the sides of public transportation buses, billboards, and even mass mailings. People of all kinds of backgrounds came across the artwork, whether they wanted to or not. However, since the point of activist artwork like this is to create social change, the effect of this artwork on its viewers is the main focus. To people who agreed with the statements on the

The audience of the poem is indeed the very people who would be most offended by the controversial and sarcastic tone of the poem, the very people the speaker of the poem is mocking—people of the Christian faith who may be saying a similar AIDS-phobic prayer. Referring back to the previous reference on the play on words for “sidious” (line 41), one notes that “seditious” is a synonym for “inflammatory” and “provocative,” which aligns to the overall caustic tone of the poem “Nobility of Blood.” Going back to the many instances of sarcasm and peculiar phrases used in the poem that were discussed earlier, one can understand these phrases through a new perspective after determining the true audience of this poem. The speaker is satirically impersonating the Christian people who believe AIDS is a God-directed plague on the sinful, for example the “junkies and faggots of New York, / San Francisco, Puerto Rico, and Haiti” (lines 2-3) and the “heterosexuals of central Africa” (line 6), and even directly mentions that these are the Lord’s “stratagems as purifier and architect of souls” (line 10). Another bizarre phrase that was mentioned earlier is the “irreproachable and serene moral majority” (line 13) to describe a group of people. This “majority” is the same audience as the indifferent public that Fury criticizes in Kissing Doesn’t

A key part of the title of the poem, the word “blood” can be used as a motif in many works of literature as a representation of family, heritage, and background. All of these lend themselves to the division of people into groups of which they often cannot control the formation. The second half of the title is the term “nobility.” This word, by definition, implies that certain groups of people are inherently more privileged or morally competent than other groups of people. Combining these two elements of the title, we achieve a meaning that states that certain people, people of a certain “blood,” have a different level of “nobility,” or privilege, than others. The last three words of this poem are “entitlement of birth,” which encompasses this idea completely. The audience that the speaker of “Nobility of Blood” addresses regard themselves as the “moral majority,” a group of people who are inherently more moral and consequently do not suffer from the AIDS disease. This is yet another instance of how Ramos Otero points out the hypocrisy in the audience’s beliefs, since under the Christian faith, it is believed that God loves all His children, and everyone is equal under God. Similar to how Fury attempts to universalize the disease through her artwork’s high level of diversity, Ramos Otero wishes to point out flaws in the