The Cultural Legacy of AIDS in Denmark

CLAD is the first project to collect, map, and analyze the cultural history of AIDS in Denmark. By focusing on both subcultural and dominant histories of AIDS, CLAD investigates how HIV/AIDS did emerge, become signified and become embedded in Danish: 1) news coverage, 2) activism and politics, 3) lived lives and 4) literature, cinema, television and art during the years 1981–2016. CLAD studies the cultural construction of AIDS and its material and historical effects by foregrounding how the history of AIDS have formed specific intuitions and affective registers that continue to frame and form contemporary understandings of AIDS, intimacy, belonging, sexuality and identity. Thus, CLAD analyses how AIDS has been culturally understood, embodied and signified discursively and affectively, and how the epidemic has created new collective affective registers that have produced new forms of belonging, desire, community and subjectivity.