Based on popular media and AIDS education posters from Germany and
Switzerland I distinguish two main phases within the history of AIDS in the 1980s and
1990s. The first of them comprises the period from the beginning of the so-called »AIDS
crisis« to the mid-1980s, during which AIDS was constructed as a disease of the (sexual)
other. In this context of sexist, racist, and classist discourses about »the plague«, a con-
nection of AIDS and male homosexuality came to the fore that was unknown in the 1970s
debate on the recurrence of infectious diseases. The second phase began around 1985
when the focus of the AIDS prevention programs was gradually shifted from »risk
groups« to »risk behavior« – not least in response to the harsh criticism raised by grass-
roots groups. This transformation, I argue, came along with a re-subjectivation of the
sexually active individual as self-reliant and socially responsible. Furthermore, the emer-
gence of the risk discourse was accompanied by an iconography of a healthy and athletic
»prevention body«. Since the early 1990s it increasingly replaced the haggard and dis-
eased »AIDS body« that had dominated the iconography of AIDS throughout the previous
decade.