Innocent Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge: AIDS Education, Childhood, and Queer Displacement in U.S. Popular Culture
Location
Ponderosa Room D
Presentation Type
Presentation
Presentation Topic
History, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Critical Theory, Medical Humanities, Childhood Studies
Start Date
6-3-2026 11:15 AM
Event Sort Order
34
Abstract
Between 1985 and 1995, as the AIDS epidemic reshaped public health discourse in the United States, children emerged as a uniquely fraught audience for AIDS education. This paper examines how popular media for children translated AIDS knowledge in ways that displaced queerness and structural causes of the epidemic onto figures of innocence, morality, and racialized difference. Drawing on cultural history and queer theory, I argue that children’s AIDS education constituted a distinct discursive arena in which sexual knowledge was carefully managed, moral responsibility individualized, and the limits of acceptable futures reasserted.
Focusing on children’s television, middle-grade fiction, and public health messaging, this project identifies three dominant discursive frameworks through which AIDS was explained to young audiences. First, the figure of the hemophiliac child—exemplified by media portrayals of transfusion-related HIV and the public reception of Ryan White—allowed AIDS to be discussed without reference to sex or drug use, preserving childhood innocence while rendering AIDS intelligible through blameless bodies. Second, as this framework became less plausible, children’s media increasingly adopted moralizing narratives that othered people with AIDS, emphasizing individual responsibility and sexual propriety. Middle-grade novels from the late 1980s and early 1990s, alongside Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s AIDS education materials, framed transmission through heterosexual sex or drug use as evidence of moral failure while retreating into privatized, family-based education. Third, a parallel set of texts left AIDS transmission unexplained altogether, foregrounding illness, loss, and care while refusing to articulate how HIV was acquired—an omission that both limited sexual knowledge and opened affective space for empathy.
By analyzing pop culture artifacts as historical sources, this paper shows how children’s AIDS education did not simply mirror adult public health discourse but actively reshaped it. In negotiating anxieties about sex, drugs, race, and futurity, these materials positioned childhood as a moral boundary through which queerness and structural inequality were displaced, sanitized, or rendered unspeakable. Ultimately, I argue that AIDS education for children functioned as a key site for regulating sexual knowledge in the late twentieth-century United States, revealing how gendered and sexual norms were reproduced through ostensibly neutral acts of teaching and care.
Innocent Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge: AIDS Education, Childhood, and Queer Displacement in U.S. Popular Culture
Ponderosa Room D
Between 1985 and 1995, as the AIDS epidemic reshaped public health discourse in the United States, children emerged as a uniquely fraught audience for AIDS education. This paper examines how popular media for children translated AIDS knowledge in ways that displaced queerness and structural causes of the epidemic onto figures of innocence, morality, and racialized difference. Drawing on cultural history and queer theory, I argue that children’s AIDS education constituted a distinct discursive arena in which sexual knowledge was carefully managed, moral responsibility individualized, and the limits of acceptable futures reasserted.
Focusing on children’s television, middle-grade fiction, and public health messaging, this project identifies three dominant discursive frameworks through which AIDS was explained to young audiences. First, the figure of the hemophiliac child—exemplified by media portrayals of transfusion-related HIV and the public reception of Ryan White—allowed AIDS to be discussed without reference to sex or drug use, preserving childhood innocence while rendering AIDS intelligible through blameless bodies. Second, as this framework became less plausible, children’s media increasingly adopted moralizing narratives that othered people with AIDS, emphasizing individual responsibility and sexual propriety. Middle-grade novels from the late 1980s and early 1990s, alongside Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s AIDS education materials, framed transmission through heterosexual sex or drug use as evidence of moral failure while retreating into privatized, family-based education. Third, a parallel set of texts left AIDS transmission unexplained altogether, foregrounding illness, loss, and care while refusing to articulate how HIV was acquired—an omission that both limited sexual knowledge and opened affective space for empathy.
By analyzing pop culture artifacts as historical sources, this paper shows how children’s AIDS education did not simply mirror adult public health discourse but actively reshaped it. In negotiating anxieties about sex, drugs, race, and futurity, these materials positioned childhood as a moral boundary through which queerness and structural inequality were displaced, sanitized, or rendered unspeakable. Ultimately, I argue that AIDS education for children functioned as a key site for regulating sexual knowledge in the late twentieth-century United States, revealing how gendered and sexual norms were reproduced through ostensibly neutral acts of teaching and care.
Presenter Bio
Darian is a 1st year PhD student in Literary and Cultural Studies with a specialization in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on the intersections of queer theory, critical neurodivergent studies, and childhood studies. Darian also has two grey tabby cats named Kink (due to the "kink" in her tail) and Jean Luc (due to Star Trek).