The Subjects of AIDS: A History of AIDS in the 21st Century

• In Event: 51.033 - HIV/AIDS in 21st Century Education and Research

Abstract

There is a history of AIDS unfurling itself in the 21st century through film, memoirs, and archival work. Such work has importantly documented the ways everyday people rose to not only challenge the insufficient and deadly silence of medical, scientific, and governmental communities, but also develop communities and practices of freedom. This aesthetic work now enters into curriculum to teach about and through the history of an epidemic that some fear is being quickly forgotten (Schulman, 2012). As David Caron (2016) noted, “Anyone who teaches HIV and AIDS at least aspects of the epidemic other than strictly medical, has had to confront his or her students’ ignorance of what happened in earlier years other than the fact that a lot of people died and that many had to face some kind of bigotry” (p. 15). This paper charts the emerging subjects of AIDS that assist in educating students about the varied ways bodies were and are subjected to HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS, after all subjects different bodies to different realities. As realities of HIV/AIDS shift, so to do the subjects that emerge in such landscapes. This history of our present draws upon emerging aesthetic objects (films, memories, plays) that have documented the histories and presents of living amidst the epidemic.

Aggleton, Yankah, and Crewe (2011) argued, education is “a field that is laden with possibilities but one that has in many ways eluded its potential” (p. 495). Education of and around HIV/AIDS is no singular thing, often being broken down as education about treatment, education about prevention, and education about positive community response. However, they noted “too many existing educational responses take the form of ‘technical’ remedies, providing checklists against which schools and their performance is to be measured” (p. 498). What is needed is education that promotes and teaches students ways to think, develop critical consciousness, imagine other worlds, and cultivate empathy for the diverse subjects inhabiting the world. Through engaging these contemporary aesthetic objects to map out subjects of AIDS, this research looks to provide an argument about the role of the arts in representing different ways HIV/AIDS discourses subject(ed) different populations to different realities and relationships.

Author

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago