Representations of Hiv/Aids in Popular American Comic Books, 1981- 1996
REPRESENTATIONS OF HIV/AIDS IN POPULAR AMERICAN COMIC BOOKS, 1981- 1996 William Richard Avila A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2021 Committee: Jeffrey Brown, Advisor Michael Decker Graduate Faculty Representative William Albertini Timothy Messer-Kruse © 2021 William Richard Avila All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Jeffery Brown, Advisor From 1981-1996, the United States experienced an epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) that held profound implications for issues ranging from civil rights, public education, and sexual mores, to government accountability, public health, and expressions of heterosexism. Popular comic books that broached the subject of HIV/AIDS during the U.S. epidemic elucidate how America’s discourse on the disease evolved in an era when elected officials, religious leaders, legal professionals, medical specialists, and average citizens all struggled to negotiate their way through a period of national crisis. The manner whereby comic book authors, illustrators, and publishers engaged the topic of HIV/AIDS changed over time but, because comic books are an item of popular culture primarily produced for a heterosexual male audience, such changes habitually mirrored the evolution of the nation’s mainstream, heteronormative debates regarding the epidemic and its sociocultural and political implications. Through studying depictions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in popular comic books, alterations in the heterocentric, national discourse emerge revealing how homophobic dismissals of the “gay plague” in the early 1980s gave way to heterosexual panic in the mid-1980s, followed by the epidemic’s reinterpretation as a national tragedy in the late-1980s.
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