‘Healthy Publics’ and the pedagogy of It’s a Sin

Abstract

The UK television series It’ s a Sin (2021) emerged alongside ongoing cultural projects that re-script acquired immunodeficiency syndrome crisis narratives and contribute to a broader ‘post-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ media culture. In this Cultural Commons piece, we consider how community health promoters have adapted the imagery from It’ s a Sin to create new human immunodeficiency virus educational materials. We situate these media practices in relation to an ongoing practice to think about the ‘end of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ through strategic health communication practices and question the cultural significance of adapting It’ s a Sin for health advocacy initiatives. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to the exchanges between popular culture and health promotion imagery. Critical health and media scholars should develop more complex cultural health criticism to capture the exchanges between health promotion and melodrama, to create accountability and avoid re-scripting normative perspectives of health and illness within post-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome media.

HIV prevention and the impact of It’s a Sin in Scotland

“…Creating this causal link, whilst probable, has knockon effects. As I have argued elsewhere (Ledin and Weil 2022), increasing awareness of HIV prevention messages has the added effect of interpolating media consumers into particular behavioural positions and public health imaginaries -a position that has been substantiated within critical media studies (McLuhan 2001(McLuhan , 2008Hall 2019) and critical public health research (Rofes 2002;Lucas and Lloyd 2005;Holt 2015;Grimm and Schwartz 2021). Linda Singer (1993: 29) describes this process as the bringing together of 'subject[s], not only through rational persuasion or empirical induction, but by exercising a kind of control through incitement'.…”

“…This includes intentional initiatives to expand and diversify testing procedures -to include critical perspectives on how to make relevant localised experiences of life with/among chronic HIV, the histories/legacies of AIDS crisis, and the uneven distribution of testing and treatment resources across the UK (Cheng, Juhasz and Shahani 2020). Elsewhere, I have argued for a 'queer health media criticism' (Ledin and Weil 2022) to expand the boundaries of HIV prevention imagery and discourses in the UK context. Here I seek to articulate the need for critical analysis of the impact of AIDS retrovisions on British society generally -and, in particular, the local context of each of the four nations.…”

“…Understanding IAS in this context means gesturing toward a longer (and largely unacknowledged) history of media production guided by particular social actors constituted within and through the development of these media: namely, how health promoters, health advocates and HIV prevention bodies shape the predominant narratives of British HIV/AIDS crisis. As I have shown elsewhere (Ledin 2022;Ledin and Weil 2022), British AIDS retrovisions -specifically cultural productions within theatre, cinema and online media since 2014, which thematise living healthily with chronic HIV -have been directly and indirectly produced and funded by HIV/AIDS prevention specialists, activists, and institutions (especially through initiatives like the HIV Innovation Fund supported by Public Health England). A primary example is After 82, produced and circulated by media producers working with/for THT.…”