Autore
Winstead, Mike

Titolo
Immunological anxiety. American horror movies, immunity narratives, and AIDS (1931 to 1985)
Periodico
Quaderni storici
Anno: 2024 - Volume: 177 - Fascicolo: 3 - Pagina iniziale: 577 - Pagina finale: 615

What was the popular narrative of immunology? AIDS focused tremendous attention on the immune system, but infection and immunity were longstanding cultural anxieties. During the five decades before AIDS, these anxieties were largely absent from American mass media – with the exception of horror movies. From the threats of foreignness and deformity in the 1930s and 1940s; to the atomic mutants of the 1950s and 1960s; to the demons, killers, and zombies of the 1970s and 1980s, horror movies’ generic subject matter aligned with contemporary thinking about infection in American medicine and culture. Using mixed methods from digital humanities, medical history, and cinema studies, this paper argues that American horror movies of the twentieth century depicted immunological anxiety: a threat of societal contamination and failed medical intervention, which gave social meaning to infection and immunity. Providing a readymade model of social marginality as an infectious threat, immunological anxiety prefigured the dysfunctional cultural response to AIDS in the 1980s.



SICI: 0301-6307(2024)177:3<577:IAAHMI>2.0.ZU;2-K
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1408/118958
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1408/118958

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