Culture/Politics/AIDS Epidemic

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course explores the affects attached to raced, sexed, and gendered embodiment through a comparative reading of discourse written on the bodies infected/affected in the transnational AIDS epidemic. In focusing on the two populations whose images have come to define popular perceptions of the epidemic—urban Western gay men and disenfranchised African women and children—we examine the shared affects of abjection and narratives of triumph attached to these bodies. Using a transnational feminist lens that pays particular heed to the racing and gendering of these bodies in a global context, we will question the ways in which these narratives of embodiment erase other bodies affected by the disease (such as African American heterosexuals and queer Africans). We will also look at the ways in which people living with HIV/AIDS have crafted a number of transnational links that provide the opportunity for both resistant and complicit performances.