AIDS product(ion), or how the homosexual manufactures his dis-ease

The cultural faces of AIDS and of sexuality have been constructed through discursive practices that implicate and challenge social power structures as a result of the conflation of the disease with the mythical notion of the gay male lifestyle. This project examines how the HIV/AIDS epidemic gets written into cultural discourse and how the multiple practices within these discourses define and redefine queer subjectivity, agency, and identity by considering how AIDS exists in politically and socially constituted communities and within the symbolic meanings of a culture's experience of the disease. It is in and among a multiplicity of discourses that AIDS activists have constructed a speaking subject inserted into the discursive structures of power shaping culture. This fluidity, this playing in and around the spaces of cultural production, is used for strategic purposes based on political goals and on an understanding of power relations.