Donovan R; International Conference on AIDS.
Int Conf AIDS. 1998; 12: 729 (abstract no. 34223).
University of Newcastle, Paddington NSW, Australia.
ISSUE: Academic analyses of the news coverage of HIV/AIDS suggest that the media is motivated by sensationalism and wilful prejudice. Queer critiques charge that the media is motivated by bigotry and homophobia. The media is positioned as either irrationally anti-queer, or collusive in the privileging of heterosexism. PROJECT: The project explores the symbiosis between the medical construction of a disease entity, and the cultural reproduction of it in the guise of the homosexual body. Mediated representations of AIDS-bodies are not merely mythological tapestries which reflect free-floating prejudices about homosexuality as the 'cause' of the epidemic. Rather, this discursive study of the Australian print media asks how it might otherwise be conceived that a pathogenic syndrome came to be sedimented in the public imagination as a pathology of gays? In medical discourse, AIDS is resonant with images of suspicious viral-bodies, whilst in media narratives they are represented as 'carriers' of polluted fluids. However, the medical phenomenon is simultaneously a cultural reproduction of the original descriptors (CAID, GRID etc) of pathogenic bodies which were originally 'known' to be polluted. RESULTS: Rather than dismiss reportage of the epidemic as homophobic, media narratives are usefully unpacked for the light they reveal as to the 'truths' which link AIDS with homosexuality. Instead of focussing on a scabrous media which exaggerates and mythologies, a discursive analysis contributes to the unravelling of the knowledge-truths which the mediated representations embody. LESSONS LEARNED: Homophobia and sensationalisation have been, and to some extent continue to be, characteristic of media narratives. Reportage of the epidemic in the Australia media is indebted to the primacy of medical discourses. The project throws into relief the importance which medical signifiers contribut to the cultural production of AIDS-bodies.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
- Australia
- Communication
- Disease Outbreaks
- HIV Infections
- HIV Seropositivity
- Homosexuality, Male
- Human Body
- Male
- Mass Media
- Negotiating
- Prejudice
- Research
- economics
- ethnology
Other ID:
UI: 102230589
From Meeting Abstracts