Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Feature-length narrative movies about HIV/AIDS created and released in the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century provide a unique form of narratives of place. Representational distinctions between urban and rural places that become evident through a comparative analysis of the contents of such media offerings reflect a noteworthy form of otherness that contributed significantly to the ongoing social construction of the AIDS pandemic during that era. Accordingly, this study explores the social construction of binary spaces (e.g., urban/rural, deviancy/normalcy, danger/safety) in relation to American AIDS movies, created and released during the 1980s and 1990s, that represent the ‘threat’ posed by urban gay men with AIDS who choose to return home to the U.S. heartland where they were born and raised. In doing so, it demonstrates how urban areas in such movies are socially constructed as the places of AIDS dystopia, in dramatic contrast to rural areas, which have historically been socially constructed as the places of moral utopia in U.S. society.