Learning From Philadelphia: Topographies of HIV/AIDS Media Assemblages

For this contribution to the special issue on "Mapping Queer Bioethics," the author employs an array of public health and popular media texts (especially Jonathan Demme's film Philadelphia) to challenge the construction and reconstruction of HIV-positive bodies as sites of bioethical concern. In outlining notions of "digital restoration," the author argues that there has been of late a remapping of the first decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through media projects assembled from archived materials. Accordingly, the author suggests that in the first decades of the 2000s, we have witnessed a media-archaeological turn, whereby old materials have been reassembled for commemorative purposes that oftentimes perform a reshaping of the topography of the first decade of the AIDS pandemic.