This book analyses the way that HIV/AIDS is often narrativised and represented in contemporary world cultures, as well as the different strategies of remembrance deployed by different (sub)cultural groups affected by the illness. Through a close study of a variety of cultural texts; including cinema, literature, theatre, art and photography amongst others, it demonstrates the trajectory that such narratives and representations have undergone since the advent of the ’discovery’ of the disease in the 1980s. Acknowledging the central - yet often overlooked - role that cultural products have played in the construction of public opinion towards the condition itself and those who suffer it, this ground-breaking volume focuses on a variety of narratives, as well as strategies of coping with HIV/AIDS that have emerged across the globe. Bringing together research on the UK, North and South America, Africa and China, it provides rich textual analyses of the ways in which the HIV positive body has been portrayed in contemporary culture, with attention to the differences between specific national contexts, whilst keeping in view a space of commonality amongst the different experiences reflected in such texts. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists and scholars of cultural and media studies, concerned with cultural production and representations of the body and sickness.
HIV in World Cultures
Biography
Gustavo Subero is a Researcher in Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Studies in the UK, and author of Queer Masculinity in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Representations.
’Appropriately global in its scope and diverse in its approaches, HIV in World Cultures is a much-needed reminder that as long as the HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to rage and kill across the planet, the question of representation remains an urgent one for scholars and artists to address.’ David Caron, The University of Michigan, USA
