Reluctant Subjects: The Place of Gay Men in Canadian Media Discourse on HIV

This dissertation maps the struggles for gay menâ s inclusion into the national and global health imaginaries of HIV/AIDS over the past three decades. I order to do so, the author analyzes three instances of public discourse on vulnerability and risk, and their representation in the continuum between individual and collective victimhood and responsibility in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as reported in Canadian media. The central claim is that national and global health discourses are underpinned by the double helix of biopolitical and humanitarian imaginations, which I argue, require the production of morally worthy subjects for anchoring political and material responses to the pandemic. This is the case because biopolitical and humanitarian imaginations nurture specific ways of collecting, understanding, reporting, and responding to epidemiological data. Equally important, these ways of imagining morally worthy subjects nurture the symbolic, that is, political and cultural moves that inform priority setting and shape resource allocation for different populations.Ph.D.2020-03-26 00:00:0