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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
An acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS describes an illness that attacks and weakens the body’s immune system, making it difficult to fight off diseases.
Thus, people with AIDS can become very ill with diseases that are rarely life-threatening for people with strong immune responses.
AIDS is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), along with probable other factors (e.g. alcohol, recreational drugs, other diseases or viruses) that lead to symptomatic illness and death. Although survival rates have increased, most HIVpositive individuals eventually develop AIDS. Individuals, however, may be infected for years without showing symptoms and may still be capable of transmitting HIV through unprotected sexual intercourse, blood-to-blood contact from sharing drug needles or blood transfusions, or from mother to child during pregnancy, labor and/or breastfeeding.
HIV cannot be transmitted through casual contact such as hugging, shaking hands or sharing cups and utensils.
In 1981, physicians in New York City and Los Angeles noted they were treating gay men for previously rare infections, calling the illness GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). The name AIDS was created in 1982 as public-health officials realized that AIDS was linked to 1970s “junkie pneumonia” deaths reported in US urban areas and was, thus, a bloodborne illness that damaged the immune system and not simply a disease of gay men.
By the 1990s, AIDS was a leading cause of death in the US. Increasing numbers of people in the US are infected through male-female sexual activity; heterosexual transmission (from men to women and from women to men) already represents the overwhelming risk factor for HIV infection in most of the world. By 1998, more than half-a-million US citizens had been diagnosed with AIDS and about 50 percent of them had died. Almost 2 million Americans are already infected with HIV. In the year 2000, there are more than 200 million HIV-infected people worldwide.
Even though first identified in the US, the vast majority of the world’s HIV-infected people live in the developing world. Studies indicate that more than 10,000 people worldwide are infected with the virus every single day. More cases of AIDS developed between 1998 and 2000 alone than the total number during the entire history of the epidemic to date. It is, therefore, clear: the decade to come will be significantly more difficult than the already difficult decade past.
The AIDS epidemic flourishes by exploiting existing societal inequalities and discrimination. Thus, the people hardest hit by the epidemic have frequently been already marginalized populations (e.g. gay men and IV drug users in the US; migrant laborers, sex workers and the poor worldwide). The epidemic’s impact only exacerbates the discrimination and marginalization experienced.
Research throughout the 1990s indicates that a vaccine against HIV infection is a long way off. Even if a vaccine becomes available, it is doubtful whether it will be widely distributed in the developing world. Additionally, there remain significant questions of legal liability for any vaccinerelated injury. Prevention strategies addressing behavior change are, therefore, absolutely imperative to stop the spread of the epidemic. In the US and worldwide, however, governments have been exceedingly slow to accept the importance of prevention to change risky sexual and drug-related behaviors. While a number of African countries, for example, have implemented government-supported condom marketing programs on radio and television, the US government and national mass media consistently reject any frank public discussion of condoms or sexual behavior.
Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985 brought the disease to the attention of the mainstream American public. Despite the ravages of the epidemic both in the US and globally however, it was not until 1987—more than six years after the disease was identified—that US President Ronald Reagan even uttered the word “AIDS” in public.
Clearly, a disease that primarily affected stigmatized populations was not worthy of significant government attention—or funding. Earvin (Magic) Johnson’s disclosure in 1992 that he was HIV-positive helped to increase popular awareness of the extent of the epidemic; political will, however, has yet to follow.
AIDS has been the galvanizing force behind a new generation of political and social activists. Building on the foundations of the women’s movement and gay and lesbian activism, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used dramatic demonstrations and civil disobedience to call attention to the epidemic and force the government—and the medical and pharmaceutical establishments—to be more responsive to those with HIV and those at risk of infection. In the early 1990s, the US Supreme Court ruled that laws preventing discrimination based on disability include people with AIDS.
Despite political resistance, a lasting positive legacy of the epidemic may be increased societal openness in discussing sex, sexual decision-making, and gay and lesbian life.
With the increased visibility of gay people, however, has come an increase in reported anti-gay hate crimes. The generation of young gay people coming out in the age of AIDS has the advantages that come with increased visibility and acceptance, coupled with a life-threatening illness and escalating rates of anti-gay violence.
Intense political and social debates continue around issues such as: mandatory testing for HIV; government reporting of names of HIV-infected individuals; contact tracing for partners of HIV-infected individuals; criminal punishment of HIV-positive individuals who engage in behavior that could transmit the virus; public and private insurance coverage for AIDS-related medications and illnesses; access to approved and experimental treatments; and the continued inadequacy of government funding for AIDS treatments and prevention. In the late 1990s, improved treatments became available which, for the first time, slowed the epidemic’s death rate in the US. These treatments are, however, very expensive and often not within the reach of the poor in the US or worldwide.
Industry:Culture
An ideological consortium that opposes federal authority over rural public lands. Most adherents reside in the far West, where the federal government exercises substantial ownership and control of public land. Wise Use proponents are an offshoot of the larger Patriot anti-government movement. Specifically their activists support the return of federal land to individuals and local governments and an end to most environmental and rural zoning regulations.
Industry:Culture
An incident of police brutality occurring during the Detroit, MI, race riots of 1967, when a report of sniping led the Detroit police to invade the Algiers Motel. During interrogation of the occupants, ten African American men and two white women, three men were shot and killed, while many of the others were badly beaten. The riots themselves had been caused by reports of racially motivated police brutality during the raid on an after-hours club—motivation confirmed in the Algiers Motel incident and in the account of it published by John Hersey in 1968.
Industry:Culture
An international avant-garde visual arts movement that emerged in the mid to late 1960s, conceptual art was concerned with the idea of art, and questioned the extent to which the production of objects was necessary. In this sense, it extended minimalism’s focus on the architectural conditions of aesthetic experience into an interrogation of broader institutional and linguistic conditions. Works that existed only as instructions or as photographic documentation of activities emphasized the idea of an artwork over its status as an object, and sought to explore conditions, such as viewers’ expectations of institutional spaces like museums, or the relations between perception and the language used to describe it. Central figures included the British group Art & Language, Robert Barry Mel Bochner, the Australian Ian Burn (also in collaboration with Mel Ramsden), the German Hanne Darboven, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Le Witt, Adrian Piper and Lawrence Weiner. In a characteristically conceptual statement of October 12, 1969, Weiner wrote, “1. The artist may construct the work. 2. The work may be fabricated. 3. The work need not be built.” Despite its critique of art as an elitist field, conceptual art met considerable resistance from popular audiences, but it has been a significant influence on subsequent developments in contemporary (postmodern) art.
Industry:Culture
An issue of federal concern since the early 1960s when concerns about the obesity and poor health of many Americans prompted President Kennedy to create the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Numerous publications highlighting the relationship between exercise and the prevention of heart disease bolstered commitment to the “work hard, play hard” ethic. Running and other forms of workout became popular in the 1970s, especially with the success of Jane Fonda’s exercise video, which prompted many other celebrities (Victoria Principal, Arnold Schwarzenegger) to develop their own profitable exercise regimens. By the late 1980s, videos had been produced to tone and sculpt every part and muscle on the body (abs and buns of steel) and cable providers had developed full-time exercise channels. Building on their own tradition of muscular Christianity YMCAs increasingly became preoccupied with acquiring exercise equipment, competing with the new health spas cropping up in every mall, and trying to draw those who wanted partial reimbursement on their health insurance. By the 1990s the new gym culture had become prominent in depictions of single social life from afternoon soaps to commercials, and President Clinton, a burger-eating Kennedy Democrat, appointed his own President’s Council on Physical Fitness, headed by Florence Griffith Joyner.
Industry:Culture
An outgrowth of the Freedom Summer of 1964, the MFDP was formed when leaders of the umbrella civil-rights organization in Mississippi, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), realized that it could not register sufficient African Americans for the state’s Democratic primaries to make any difference to the system of racial segregation and discrimination. Instead, COFO enrolled disenfranchised blacks in the MFDP, affiliated the new organization to the Democratic National Committee and sent delegates to Atlantie City for the 1964 Democratic Party convention. Debate at the convention about whether to recognize the MFDP delegates instead of those of the Mississippi Democratic Party was quashed by President Johnson, who feared white southerners would stampede to the Republican Party. While Fannie Lou Hamer argued passionately for the rights of MFDP delegates, Johnson argued that blacks needed to show him gratitude for passing the Civil Rights Act. The black convention movement was one of the legacies of the work of the MFDP.
Industry:Culture
Anabolic steroids, artificial synthetic derivatives of the male sex hormone testosterone, promote the growth of muscle tissue, increase overall body strength and improve athletes’ recovery time to facilitate intense training regimens, while adversely affecting the liver and both the cardiovascular and reproductive systems. Limitations in testing equipment account for the failure to detect the drug at major sporting events, along with competitors’ efforts to evade detection, timing their dosages to avoid testing positive, or substituting urine samples by various clandestine methods (many of which were graphically depicted in the movie The Program, 1993, about a university football program). The requirement in American football that players bulk up has made this a sport in which the use of bodybuilding drugs is endemic.
Industry:Culture
Anticipating the counterculture of the 1960s, the beat generation rejected the life of the “organization man” and suburban culture. A generation weary of conventions, beat artists undertook a mystical search for salvation in poetry, jazz, sex and meditation. For them, suburban lifestyle restricted freedom and creativity as did women and settling into marriage. Instead, beat artists strove to be down and out; vagrancy and mobility (often in a car, a symbol of suburban culture) were virtues. Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl” (1955) assailed the nation and its values, making heroes of drop-outs and drug users who had rejected families and jobs and taken time off from good behavior. The beats’ bible, though, was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which describes Kerouac’s four trips across America in the company of his friends, Neal Cassidy (perhaps the true moving spirit behind the beats), Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. By the 1960s the term “beatnik” was widely used for anyone who took on the beat style, without the substance.
Industry:Culture
Any baby born in the US, regardless of the status of its parents, is automatically an American citizen. Nearly 4 million citizens were born annually in the 1990s, the birth rate having peaked above that threshold in 1990 with a birth rate of 16.7 per 1,000 and total live births of 4,158,000. Despite the rise in numbers, the birth rate is half of what it was in 1910, and has dropped from 23.7 per 1,000 in 1960. While there are many American babies, they are spread among more people whose cultural expectations of parenting, consumption, care and development Americanize babies in diverse ways.
Many babies born after the Second World War, for example in the baby boom and subsequent generations, experienced the movement from family folklore in pregnancy and childcare to more scientific medical models, mediated by physicians and authorities, especially Dr Benjamin Spock, whose attitudes on discipline and freedom changed childcare. As nuclear families have fewer children and fewer nearby relatives, in fact, patterns of information flow about babies have embraced books, neighbors, mass media and institutions, including parenting classes. Nevertheless, this apparent commitment to “better babies” has not overcome vast disparities in information and prenatal care, as well as problematic incidences of teenage pregnancy and infant mortality within the US.
Given widespread controls on natality and family size, the arrival of new babies generally evokes celebration within most American cultures. Showers before birth or adoption, religious cere monies for the baby and parents (baptism or bris) and gifts, photos and exhibition all mark family and community participation in birth and babyhood as an event. Naming traditions vary from those who reinforce family continuity or cultural heritage to those who opt for names from television and pop culture. Yet, American news media also talk constantly of babies who are abandoned and abused as extreme cases that underscore a shared ideal of innocence and loving comfort.
As babies grow up, parenting includes a stress on individualism and freedom of movement and action. This leads to variations in discipline and personality across groups, which are sometimes mediated by shared daycare—one of the most expensive and difficult responsibilities of parenting in the US. Still, debates over issues like toilet training, corporal punishment and rules of behavior have also been part of discourses of baby and childcare since Dr Spock.
Babies are not only responsibilities and celebrations, they are also opportunities for marketing. As Paul Reiser writes in his wry Babyhood (1997:42) “we watched other couples with babies and concluded that we not only had a lot of things to learn but a lot of things to go out and buy.” Marketing includes advice books, toys and educational materials, fashion, healthcare paraphernalia as well as furniture. While all may be “for the baby,” additional motivations (implicit in advertising) include making the baby smarter, prettier and more successful, flaunting care and wealth and protecting the baby against an uncertain world.
Depictions of babies provide celebratory moments to many mass media—whether long-running television shows or movies from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance to Father of the Bride II (1995). In 1992 the choice of fictional television newswoman Murphy Brown to have a child out of wedlock even entered American political debate as Vice-President Dan Quayle attacked her choice. The vulnerability of babies also suggests darker visions of America, whether in crime shows or on the news, asking how the responsibilities of the American dream are being met for a new generation.
Industry:Culture
Approximately 3 million Puerto Ricans live in the continental United States, with a large concentration of 2 million in New York City. Migration from Puerto Rico to New York began with merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the second half of the nineteenth century most were political exiles. At the close of the century, many cigar makers, educated and politicized through workplace readings, settled in Lower Manhattan.
Since Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the US in 1898, the United States has served as the Puerto Rican escape valve to combat unemployment, economic hardship and overpopulation, despite mainland living conditions that sometimes were worse than those left behind. Once Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship in 1917, almost 11,000 moved to New York, creating a large enclave in East Harlem, where previous Puerto Rican immigrants had settled. In this community, later known as El Barrio, they preserved their culture and language through community groups and Spanish-language newspapers and books.
The most extensive migration occurred after the Second World War as thousands saw their way of life disappear as industrialization, the decimation of agriculture and population growth rapidly created severe unemployment. In the 1950s, airlines introduced lower fares and opportunities for unskilled, semi-skilled and agricultural labor expanded on the mainland. An estimated 470,000 predominantly working-class and rural Puerto Ricans emigrated, including more women than previously During the 1950s and 1960s, most migrants settled in New York City and New Jersey, but others populated Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA and Cleveland, OH.
Although American citizens, Puerto Ricans were largely poor immigrants. They occupied substandard housing, faced unscrupulous landlords and lacked familiarity with US cities and cold weather. They faced discrimination because of their race and ethnicity, language (and accents) and religion. Other problems of inner-city poverty— crime, gangs, drugs and, more recently high rates of AIDS/HIV—also afflicted them.
Religious and civic associations formed a collective fight against racism and discrimination, and gave the immigrants a political voice and a sense of dignity. They fought being viewed as the stereotypical Latino portrayed in Leonard Bernstein’s musical/film West Side Story (1957, film 1961). The Puerto Rican Travelling Theater, founded in 1967, presents plays in English and Spanish. The Museo del Barrio, founded in 1969, emphasizes contemporary Puerto Rican and Latin American artists.
In the 1970s, the pattern of migration began to shift. Many low-skilled workers returned as mainland manufacturing declined and jobs moved overseas. Others, who never intended to stay permanently, returned after years of work to buy their dream house. Yet, after the 1980s, many highly skilled university graduates and professionals reversed this flow, leaving the island to settle in the states.
The generation of Puerto Ricans born in the (continental) United States follows a different path. Taking advantage of educational opportunities, fluent in English, versed in American culture and seeking employment in the civil-rights era, they leave the barrio and have made inroads in the professions, the visual and performing arts, mass media, education and politics.
Industry:Culture
