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Raimondo, Meredith. "The Next Wave: Media Maps of the ‘Spread of AIDS’," Women's Studies, Emory University, December 1999.
This interdisciplinary dissertation explores mass media representation of the “spread of AIDS” in the United States from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Using sources including news accounts, science journalism, policy documents, autobiography, music, and film, I explore the circulation of narratives tracking the movement of the epidemic through space, a popular epidemiology of the AIDS epidemic. Race, gender, sexuality, class, and location intersect to create borders around territories of risk. I examine the appearance and disappearance of a particular location - the South - on these narrative maps. I begin with the HIV’s diffusion from its purported “African origin,” examining the representation of the U.S. as an endangered periphery threatened by a foreign pathogen. I move to the depiction of U.S. cities, the first domestic sites affected by the epidemic. By the late 1980s, most media implied that the city provided natural containment, separating “risk groups” from the “general population.” Stories about gay men “coming home to die” challenged this mapping, describing the migration of the epidemic to rural areas. This narrative failed to imagine rural transmission, assuming that HIV was an urban visitor. The National Commission on AIDS’ 1990 visit to Georgia forced the media to find new ways to describe rural areas. Many reporters used distorted stereotypes of the South, describing an “epidemic of bigotry and fear” among “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” These stories concluded that the nation needed to replace bigotry with compassion. In the second half of this project, I examine the ramifications of these narrative maps of mobility. Activist cultural productions drew attention to the epidemic in rural areas and promoted a politics of compassion. In several cultural texts, the representation of locations as communities addressed the problem of geographic difference, assimilating local particularity to national ideals. I conclude with a consideration of Belle Glade, Florida. Media and researchers struggled to assess whether Belle Glade predicted the future of the epidemic, an issue first raised by a controversial theory of mosquito transmission and addressed in subsequent scientific research on “heterosexual AIDS.” I argue that the inadequacy of these media maps demonstrates the necessity for more complex approaches to the politics of location.
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