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theses

As AIDS proliferated in Newark, New Jersey through the 1980s, local AIDS-care advocates conceptualized AIDS in ways that reflected the disease’s impact on Newarkers. In reframing a problem that was predominately cast as a “gay disease” in North America, AIDS activists in Newark sought to highlight the growing prevalence of HIV and AIDS among urban communities of color. These efforts sought to direct national attention and resources towards affected “at risk” Newarkers by self-consciously portraying HIV and AIDS as a disease of the family. The lynchpin in this discourse was the pediatric AIDS patient. Discussions of HIV-positive children, and the “family disease” frame, became normalizing shorthand for addressing the complex biological transmission of the disease. By the late 1980s, advocates for Newark recognized the political utility in characterizing AIDS as a family disease at a time when the federal government was preparing to allocate funds for the areas hardest hit by the epidemic. This unique discourse was particularly useful in not only drawing attention to the problem of AIDS, but also to the societal “ills” associated with the disease’s prevalence among impoverished communities of color in Newark. As the family disease discourse evolved, Newark came to represent the ubiquitous, albeit insidious, urban problems that contributed to and exacerbated the epidemic in similar U.S. cities. Reserved almost exclusively to descriptions of families of color, the family disease discourse must be understood as—an implicit, if not explicit—response to mainstream perceptions of the inner city. Efforts to cope with AIDS in Newark benefited from the family disease script. Yet the legacy of the family disease discourse perhaps further encumbered cultural perceptions of inner city families as well. The family disease discourse thus inextricably linked the AIDS epidemic in impoverished communities color, and inner city families, to the pernicious social pathologies narrative that had over-determined perceptions of Newark since the late1960s.

ETD_4481

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Jason M. Chernesky

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10002600001.ETD.000067589

doi:10.7282/T3028Q7N

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.