HIV on TV: Popular Culture's Epidemic

(Hardback)

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Description

In the 80s and 90s it was Designing Women and The Real World, today its Greys Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder. 35 years since HIV hit prime time it remains a hot topic for TV producers to include in storylines. While the motivation behind creating an HIV narrative is sometimes the disseminate facts about HIV and STIs, far more often it is the sexy ratings a show can receive by including a taboo or controversial topic. As a result, while some education is provided to audiences, far more shows are found only perpetuating misinformation and stereotypes. As a result viewers, young populations especially, continue to believe they are not at risk. HIV on TV: Popular Cultures Epidemic offers a discussion of how HIV has permeated popular culture. News broadcasts, movies, television shows, even music lyrics have imbedded messages about HIV. Examining over 35-years of the HIV evolution on television this book offers a critical lens for examining how medial topics, specifically HIV, are covered in the media. Cutting across three common genres (news, drama, and comedy), characterizations, contexts, and themes are critically analyzed to uncover what each genre has contributed to audiences understanding of risk, and what it is like to live with HIV. In total, the book offers three perspectives of the lessons presented about HIV. First, is the view from the screen; asking what the characters themselves say to the viewer. Second the book shares results from interviews with viewers themselves who have recalled seeing the shows mentioned. Finally, the book offers thoughts and reflections from writers, producers, and actors involved in the narratives. Providing the greatest insight, an interview with Daniel Franzese (Mean Girls, Road to Recovery, Looking) offers his experience in playing multiple roles as someone living with HIV and a challenge to media writers to be cautious in how they choose to write HIV into a storyline.

Reviews

The author of this volume provides a deeply engaging and enriching account of HIV/AIDS (mis)representations and (mis)constructions in the popular media. Well-researched and beautifully written, this book provides a robust frameworktheoretical and methodologicalfor understanding how our notions of illness and disease are socially constructed and influenced by the media. -- Arvind Singhal, Samuel and Edna Marston Endowed Professor of Communication, The University of Texas at El Paso
The arguments and insights in this manuscript are both new and important. A researcher in AIDS representation myself, I have been shocked and disappointed by the lack of information andcruciallycultural analysis of the AIDS epidemic. This work offers an important contribution to a conversation in which there are relatively few participants. -- Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University
HIV on TV: Popular Cultures Epidemic demands that readers take popular culture representations of HIV and AIDS seriously. In addition to providing a rich history of how HIV has been portrayed in television and film, Johnson offers her candid assessments about how media creators must repair the problems that continue to persist in popular culture depictions of HIV. The book offers the opportunity for scholars who study media, health, rhetoric, popular culture, sexuality, and/or journalism to combine various threads of thought and enhance how they envision popular culture as a form of education. -- Jimmie Manning, Northern Illinois University

Author Bio

Malynnda Johnson is assistant professor of communication at Indiana State University.