AIDS Panic Research Articles

Erratum to: AIDS Panic in the Twenty-First Century: The Tenuous Legal Status of HIV-Positive Persons in America.

Erratum to: AIDS Panic in the Twenty-First Century: The Tenuous Legal Status of HIV-Positive Persons in America.

Erratum to: AIDS Panic in the Twenty-First Century: The Tenuous Legal Status of HIV-Positive Persons in America.

Erratum to: AIDS Panic in the Twenty-First Century: The Tenuous Legal Status of HIV-Positive Persons in America.

セクシュアリティ化される男性性の理想：1930―80年代の米国フィジカル・カルチャー雑誌における男性身体表象とホモソーシャル連続体

This study analyzed the momentum of the (hetero) sexualization of masculinity through physical culture magazines published during the 1930s-1980s in the United States, and also examined the social conditions caused by the corresponding changes. Since Foucault suggested the “repressive hypothesis” of sexuality, it has been widely recognized that, at some moment in modern history, same sex desire was identified as an inevitable identity, rather than just a deviant act, as considered previously. However, several recent studies have questioned this hypothesis as being oversimplified. By reviewing previous research, this study examined the momentum of segregation between hetero/homosexual desire, which was observed in the 1950s, i.e. much more recently than generally recognized, and the obvious hetero-sexualization of the masculine ideal, which occurred after the 1970s. The method employed was to compare 2 major physical culture magazines. To provide a contrasting perspective with regard to different sexuality, the first (famous) physique magazine, which began to be published in 1951 for potentially homosexual customers, was adopted to comparatively and diachronically examine the representation of male figures on the cover pages. This analysis revealed the following results: 1. During the 1930s-1950s, the ideal of masculinity was not yet hetero-sexualized and exemplified a broad range of desire which was not yet segregated as hetero/homosexual. 2. During the 1950s-1960s, physical culture magazines started to exclude non-heterosexual elements from their representations because of the risk that they could be potentially interpreted as homosexual. 3. The rise of the sexual minority rights movement in and after the 1970s, and the 1980s AIDS panic promoted homosexual visibility and expedited homophobia as a form of counter-action. This advance caused rapid and obvious hetero-sexualization of mainstream physical culture media. In conclusion, the reason for the hetero-sexualization of physical culture magazines was a reaction to the increasing presence of homosexuals. It could be said that the rise of heterosexual self-consciousness itself was, to some extent, a counter to, and paradoxically caused by the creation and increasing awareness of homosexual identity. Moreover, these changes in the masculine ideal, and especially the examples before the 1950s, suggest the possibility of an ideal masculinity shared by hetero/homosexual males, which Sedgwick (1985) suggests is a homosocial continuum—namely, homosociality without discontinuity between homosocial and homosexual desire.

AIDS Panic in the Twenty-First Century: The Tenuous Legal Status of HIV-Positive Persons in America.

Thirty-four states criminalize HIV in some way, whether by mandating disclosure of one's HIV status to all sexual partners or by deeming the saliva of HIV-positive persons a "deadly weapon." In this paper, we argue that HIV-specific criminal laws are rooted in historical prejudice against HIV-positive persons as a class. While purporting to promote public health goals, these laws instead legally sanction discrimination against a class of persons.

Frictionless Sharing and Digital Promiscuity

This article analyses the recent Facebook innovation of “frictionless sharing”, a term which describes a smoother and wider distribution of content by individual users and a less overtly acknowledged but more efficient instrumentalization of users' immaterial labour within a structure of corporate monetization. It builds on my recent work on “the sharing subject” of contemporary digital media, in which I argue that current online social networking practices, in their emphasis on “sharing” content with networks of contacts, construct and validate the networked subject according to a version of neoliberal individualism. Moreover, the construction of this subject position implicitly recalls the heteronormativity of AIDS panic, through an unlikely rebranding of promiscuity as a desirable and successful mode of interactivity. If the new rhetoric of “sharing” erases the riskiness of circulation previously encoded in dominant images of virality, notably behaviours associated with HIV, then what is the relationship of the projected potential of “frictionless sharing” to existing normative frames of ethics and morality? In approaching this question, I revisit significant queer interventions into concepts of community and risk that emerged in the post-AIDS context, notably Tim Dean's recent examination of the barebacking subculture to which mediations of an idealized frictionlessness are also central.

The Domestication of AIDS: Stigma, Gender, and the Body Politic in Japan

In this article, I examine the processes by which AIDS has been “domesticated,” and Japanese women stigmatized as vectors of HIV/AIDS, once regarded as a “foreign” disease in Japan. Women are associated with ritual pollution and impurity in the Shinto tradition. At the same time, Japanese women are blamed for eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of material pursuits. As a sequel to the “AIDS panic” of the 1980s, which centered on “foreign women” and women who dated foreigners, in the late 1990s, the Japanese media incited widespread anxiety over a phenomenon known as enjo kōsai, or “compensated dating,” in which Japanese teenage girls are said to exchange favors (sometimes sexual) for money with older Japanese men. After describing the social and political conditions making the link between young girls, consumption, and AIDS appear natural in late 1990s Japan, I draw on material from some interviews with HIV-positive women to show how these women are marginalized by narratives that fail to take the particularity and the heterogeneity of their experiences into account. While these women resist the stigma that goes along with being labeled a “sex worker,” their stories are drowned out by larger stories that speak of the body politic and national concerns over generation divides, demographic shifts, and gender relations in times of rapid social change.

Minding Your Peers and Queers: Female sex workers in the AIDS discourse in Australia and South-east Asia {1}

Sex workers have been incorporated into the Western AIDS discourse initially as a category of 'risk group'. The model of 'peer education' developed successfully by gay men in the West has been used with sex workers in Australia and is being exported to South-east Asia. This paper shows that the role of the 'peer educator' is paradoxical, and embedded in locally specific laws, cultural factors and power relations involving the sex industry. Ignoring the politico-cultural context can mean that peer workers are involved in their own surveillance and in reinforcing the stigma of sex work. The 'Asian prostitute' has been characterised both as an exotic commodity and as the focus of 'AIDS panic'; however, alternative voices express both complexity of the sex industry and more immediate concerns which need to be confronted before HIV/AIDS can be given meaning.

AIDS Panic in Japan, or How to Have a Sabbatical in an Epidemic

AIDS Panic in Japan, or How to Have a Sabbatical in an Epidemic

Sexual Ethics in the Age of Epidemic

In this essay I follow one argument strand from Linda Singer's Erotic Welfare. How can we have a forward-looking and affirmative ideal of sexual freedom when the AIDS panic has altered the sexual landscape and instigated new justifications for oppressive sexual disciplines? How can we be sexual subjects when processes of commodification and disciplinary practices have constrained sexual expression while proliferating sexual fetishes? These are some of the questions this book formulates, without answering.

AIDS panic: effects of mass media publicity

Twenty-four patients with AIDS panic, who presented to the psychiatric services between 1983 and 1986, were assessed on various clinical rating scales. The severity of clinical symptoms was estimated by adding together the total scores on Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety. The level of mass media publicity about AIDS was calculated by counting the number of major reports about the disease in national and local newspapers and on television. The findings suggested that, contrary to expectations, the referral rates of AIDS panic cases were highest in the earlier months when the level of media activity was low and decreased during the months following intense publicity about AIDS. Patients who presented in the later stages also showed fewer anxiety symptoms.