Representations of HIV/AIDS in Contemporary Hispano-American and Caribbean Culture

Exploring the mechanisms and strategies used in different cultures across Hispano-America and the Caribbean to narrativise, represent and understand HIV/AIDS as a social and human phenomenon, this book examines a wide range of cultural, artistic and media texts, as well as issues of human phenomenology, to understand the ways in which HIV positive individuals make sense of their own lives, and of the ways in which the rest of society sees them. Drawing on a variety of cultural texts from cinema, television, photography and literature, the author considers the manner in which contemporary cultural forms have shaped a body of public opinion in response to the social and cultural impact of HIV/AIDS, re-interpreting the condition in the light of advances in treatment. With attention to both the temporality and spatiality of production, this book examines whether heterosexual and homosexual, and masculine and feminine bodies are narrativised in the same manner, considering the question of whether representations foster discrimination of any kind. The book also asks whether representations across Latin America are homogenous or varied according to national, social or cultural context, and explores the commonalities between the representations of HIV/AIDS in Hispano-America and the Caribbean and other global narratives. A detailed study of the various representations of HIV/AIDS and the construction of public opinion, this book will appeal to scholars of cultural, media and film studies, the sociology of health, the body and illness, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Gustavo Subero is a Researcher in Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Studies in the UK. He is the author of Queer Masculinity in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Representations and editor of HIV in World Cultures: Three Decades of Representations.

Chapter 1 HIV/AIDS, Deviance and Plague Imagery in Anahi Berneri's Un año sin amor and Jochen Hick's Via Appia; Chapter 2 Constructing the Visual Rhetoric of AIDS in the Photographic Work of Mario Vivado and Hector Toscano; Chapter 3 HIV, Edu-entertainment and Female Subjectivity in La cara oculta de la luna; Chapter 4 1An earlier version of this chapter first appeared in HIV in World Cultures: Three Decades of Representations (Ashgate 2013); Chapter 5 Narrativizing HIV Positive Bodies in the Literatures of Hispano-America;