Growing ill: Spanish childhood, HIV and the echoes of a pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the Spanish films La niña de tus sueños (Jesús R. Delgado, 1995), Cachorro (Miguel Albaladejo, 2004) and Estiu 1993 (Carla Simon, 2017), which revolve around characters with HIV/AIDS. In these films, innocence and youth are often highlighted through children and adolescents who live with and next to HIV. Such a move serves to legitimize these cases of HIV and AIDS, which are marked as exceptional cases through their innocence and thus escape the feedback loop of disease and impending death that categorizes popular thinking on the illness. By highlighting these representations of children and HIV/AIDS, this article argues that the coupling of guilt, innocence and illness allows audiences and a larger public in Spain to inhabit a sanitized version of history and ignore the messy complexities of living through and with the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV/AIDS
• children
• contemporary Spain
• illness
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of course, HIV/AIDS has been a frequent and recurrent trope in queer cinema, though these films often go unrecognized or unknown to mainstream audiences. To name only a small sample of the earliest queer “AIDS films”, which are certainly not well-known to most mainstream audiences in the United States or beyond: Buddies (Bressan Jr. 1985), Parting Glances (Sherwood 1986), Longtime Companion (René 1989), The Living End (Araki 1992), Les nuits fauves (Collard 1992), Hessed Mufla/Amazing Grace (Guttman 1992) or Zero Patience (Greyson 1993).

2 Major-release and mainstream films that fit this category range include – but are not limited to – films like Philadelphia (Demme 1993), Todo sobre mi madre (Almodóvar 1999), Rent (Columbus 2005), Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée 2013) and 120 battements par minute (Campillo 2017).

3 A number of recent studies have critically examined the period of Spanish history known as the Transition and the Movida. For more on the topic, see the excellent anthology by Nichols and Rosi Song (2014), Nichols and Song (2014) Wheeler’s account of the politics leading up to the Transition (2020), and Fernández de Alba’s study of the years immediately preceding it (2020).

4 The “Sí da, No da” campaign (1989) showed a series of anthropomorphized male and female symbols performing a wide variety of daily actions that cause (“sí da”) versus those that do not cause (“no da”) HIV/AIDS. For more on this campaign, see Allbritton (2023, 141–143) and Keller and Snyder (2011, 95). Belén Remacha (2019) also provides an excellent account of some of the more well-known HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns in Spain, including those by the Spanish Ministry of Health.

5 A number of scholars of children and childhood have in fact considered the idealized innocence of the “figure of the child”, particularly in the way that such a figural child differs from actual children. In doing so, they combat the more popular vision of children as purely innocent beings. In theory, see Lee Edelman’s take on innocence and the figural child in No Future (2004) or Stockton’s The Queer Child (2009). In the Spanish context, see Joanne Faulkner’s “Vulnerability of ‘Virtual’ Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence” (2013), Wright’s The Child in Spanish Cinema (2013), Erin Hogan’s The Two cines con niño (2018) and Thomas’s Inhabiting the In-between (2019).

6 For more on Ryan White’s story, see his eponymous website (HRSA 2022) and news reports of the time, including Cohen (1991).

7 In January of 1987, the three-year-old Pagalday became the first child to be expelled from school in Spain because of his serostatus. See Ruiz de Azua (1987) for more on the origins of his case, which eventually reached Spanish national courts and ended with the young boy’s death from complications from HIV/AIDS in 1998. The case of Sierra, who is discussed briefly in this article later, was similarly polarizing and reached national headlines.

8 The bibliography for Almodóvar and this film is, naturally, extensive. For more information on health and AIDS in the film, see Allbritton (2013), Gutiérrez-Albilla (2017) and Rivera-Cordero (2012).

9 Sierra’s story was immortalized in a 1992 episode of the hugely popular television show Farmacia de Guardia (1991–1995). Sierra herself appeared in this episode and played a lightly fictionalized version of herself which nonetheless hewed closely to her own life story. See Gallardo (2021) for more about the episode and on the Sierra’s story.

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Notes on contributors

Dean Allbritton

Dean Allbritton is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Colby College, where he teaches courses on Spanish visual culture, illness, and gender and sexuality. His work examines linkages between sex, sickness and health in contemporary Spanish visual culture and adult media. His monograph, Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain, explores the cultural history of HIV/AIDS in Spain through visual culture and ephemera of the time and was published by Liverpool University Press in early 2023. He has published articles in Porn Studies, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Hispanic Research Journal, among others. Email: [email protected]