Constructions of Contagion: Sickness and Health in Two Pandemics

Thursday, February 18, 2021, 6:00pm EST
This event will be ONLINE and in ENGLISH
Live stream on facebook.com/kjccnyu/live

Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain by Dean Allbritton. This book examines the cultural history of the early years of AIDS in Spain (1981-1987) as it has been told through television and print media, ephemeral products of visual culture, fiction film, and the so-called risk groups that lived through the epidemic. Taking up Raymond Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’, Dean Allbritton argues that a structure of feeling sick emerges in these early years of AIDS in Spain; it is alternately a sense of living through historicity, a gesticulation away from sick groups, a banding together in illness, a reactionary abandonment of hope, and a revolutionary turn towards the future. It is through illness—through HIV/AIDS—that this wild potential is brought about.

Dean Allbritton is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Colby College, where he teaches courses on Spanish cinema, culture, and gender and sexuality. His work analyzes representations of illness and health in contemporary Spanish culture as political metaphors of national wellbeing. His current book project, Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain, explores the cultural history of HIV/AIDS in Spain through visual culture and ephemera of the time and is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. He has published articles in The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de estudios hispánicos, and Hispanic Research Journal, among others.