Representations of HIV and AIDS

What happened to the plague of HIV/AIDS that once seemed so threatening? Gabriele Griffin argues that the explosion of HIV/AIDS into highly visible cultural forms, from movies, theatre, activist interventions, and art from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s has been replaced by a retreat to artisitic invisibility. Griffin suggests that changes in the understanding of HIV/AIDS, the shift from “dying of the disease” to “living with it” in Western cultures, and a failure to grasp the full extent of the growth and impact of HIV/AIDS in a number of African and Asian countries has led to the “death” of the disease in the Western media.