AIDS in U.S. Black Popular Culture: Can Entertainment Television Be Educational?
Despite wide education via public service announcements and other media, African American women in the U.S. continue to acquire HIV/AIDS at alarming rates. AIDS educators, researchers, and media practitioners are now exploring other media genres as vehicles for targeted HIV education. One approach is to fold messages about HIV/AIDS into established programming. This research explores this approach in the context of situation comedies aimed at young adult African Americans. The specific text examined here is an HIV-themed episode of Girlfriends, a sitcom featuring a cast of and targeted for an audience of African American women that was aired on the UPN network during AIDS awareness week in June 2003. An analysis of the episode reveals that sitcoms are uniquely equipped to accomplish several specific educational tasks. Girlfriends creates a viewer affinity that allows media practitioners to convey important messages such as HIV/AIDS to the African American audience. This viewer affinity allows the viewer to develop comfortable and interpersonal conversations with other viewers on the topic of HIV/AIDS without discussing their own lives. Though educational, numerous references were used in the episode regarding promiscuity and African American women. It is evident that stigmas about HIV/AIDS continue to plague the media. While a textual analysis of this kind needs to be supplemented with information about real audience responses, it suggests the promise of this approach to HIV/AIDS education for young adult African American women.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Journalism
Research Advisor:
Paula Treichler
Department of Research Advisor:
Institute of Communications Research
Year of Publication:
2003