Growing ill: Spanish childhood, HIV and the echoes of a pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Spanish films La niña de tus sueños (Jesús R. Delgado, 1995), Cachorro (Miguel Albaladejo, 2004) and Estiu 1993 (Carla Simon, 2017), which revolve around characters with HIV/AIDS. In these films, innocence and youth are often highlighted through children and adolescents who live with and next to HIV. Such a move serves to legitimize these cases of HIV and AIDS, which are marked as exceptional cases through their innocence and thus escape the feedback loop of disease and impending death that categorizes popular thinking on the illness. By highlighting these representations of children and HIV/AIDS, this article argues that the coupling of guilt, innocence and illness allows audiences and a larger public in Spain to inhabit a sanitized version of history and ignore the messy complexities of living through and with the HIV/AIDS pandemic.