Now that's a good girl: discourses of African American women, HIV/AIDS, and respectability.

Abstract

Now That's a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability draws upon black feminist theory, black queer studies, and HIV/AIDS cultural studies to examine discursive representations of African Americans in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This dissertation argues that the discursive production of the HIV/AIDS epidemic takes place at multiple sites within the nation-state. Combining a analysis of biomedical discourses and African American popular discourses, this dissertation interrogates the ways these discourses have worked to support normative constructions of race, gender, and sexualities. Now That's a Good Girl illustrates both how state discourses of HIV/AIDS drew upon racist and gendered ideas of black women and men in its construction of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how African American HIV/AIDS discourses attempted to counter these discourses. It argues that African American HIV/AIDS discourses revitalized a politics of respectability in an effort to shield African American women, families, and communities from racist stereotypes of deviancy. Finally, this dissertation attempts to read past these politics of respectability in order to question the queer possibilities these discourses attempt to repress.