UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

This course uses feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks to interrogate the social, political, and cultural aspects of HIV/AIDS. Not merely a virus, HIV is also a set of cultural meanings tied to gender, race, nation, and the body. By focusing on political activism and cultural production (film, art, etc.) we will employ a critical humanistic approach to the epidemic that goes beyond biomedicine or epidemiology. Because a great deal of the popular and scholarly attention to the AIDS crisis has focused on white, gay, cisgender men, the course examines the politics of HIV/AIDS through an intersectional lens that takes into account how race, gender, class, nationality and so on have shaped the crisis and the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. Although we will focus on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in the United States from the time the crisis emerged in the early 1980s through today, we will also consider the pandemic in terms of US empire.