Résultats de recherche

1. Objectifs

Intentions :
« My research and analysis confronts the issues surrounding AIDS and gay families and the discrepancies between media representations of gay families and actual lived experience. In this thesis I have paid specific attention to how social reactions to HIV/AIDS, gays, and the changing constitution of the family have shaped the discourse on gay families in the 1990s. Above all else, this project offers an alternative perspective to the dominant discourse circulating in the 1990s around the topic of gay families. » (pp. 13-14)

2. Méthode

Type de traitement des données :
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

« This thesis investigates print media discourse on gay families in the context of HIV/AIDS and the gay rights movement. Comparing and contrasting reports from the mainstream heterosexual press, the mainstream gay press, and the gay community press, revealed a moral discourse on AIDS that implicated gay men throughout the 1980s. At the same time, a resurgence appeared in religious conservative forces working to recuperate the traditional nuclear family ideal through a family values agenda. The importance of family in gay communities during the 1980s meant that the existence of gay families, legal and social discrimination, and caregiving support, became important components in the gay/AIDS movement. As cases of HIV and AIDS surfaced in heterosexuals in the late 1980s, and AIDS factored into the traditional home and family domain, a discourse on gay families also started to emerge in the mainstream press. Unlike the media images projected in the previous decade of single promiscuous gay men with AIDS, gay families were presented as normalized: sanitized, monogamous, and AIDS-free, much like the traditional nuclear family. The issues around HIV, AIDS, stigmatization of HIV/AIDS and gay families also waned in the gay community press during the 1990s as a result of changing attitudes around disease, death, and the family, although gay families continue to be talked about in the context of gay rights. » (p. iii)