Positioning the image of AIDS

AIDS posters can be treated as material objects whose production, distribution and consumption varied across time and place. It is also possible to reconstruct and analyse the public health discourse at the time these powerful images appeared. More recently, however, these conventional historical approaches have been challenged by projects in literary and art criticism. Here, images of AIDS are considered in terms of their function in and for a new discursive regime of power centred on the human body and its visualization. How images of AIDS came to be understood in Western culture in relation to wider political and economic conditions redefines the historical task.