A Dramatization of Post-AIDS Stigma: A Pentadic Analysis of the CDC\u27s “Let\u27s Stop HIV Together” Campaign

Health campaigns have traditionally crafted messages aimed towards influencing an audience’s health knowledge, attitude, and behavior. This stands true for the CDC’s recently launched campaign titled, “Let’s Stop HIV Together,” which aims to reframe the way the general public thinks about HIV/AIDS as a manageable illness. This chapter suggests that the CDC’s campaign messages operate with a “post-AIDS” frame, which celebrates the medical advancements for treating and managing HIV/AIDS. While the campaign aims to offer information that destigmatizes the way HIV/AIDS is talked about, it utilizes various rhetorical moves to flatten the multiple economic and political constraints that accompany surviving with HIV/AIDS in the “post-AIDS” world. By analyzing how the CDC uses communication, rhetorically, to mute structural constraints as central to survivability, this paper critiques the “post-AIDS” discourses used by the campaign to suggest that anyone with HIV has equal access to survival resources