ABSTRACT
The epigraph’s imagery of women finding themselves in the airport and boarding a plane without having been told how to pack for this trip, much less given time to do so, is a fitting way to begin this story about two women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan and Essence , and how they framed and presented women’s needs in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Toward that end, this essay examines a moment in the HIV/AIDS epidemic where these two prominent women’s magazines must discursively navigate the relationship between women, heterosexuals, race, and a ‘queer’ epidemic in the late 80s. In general, magazines are culturally important because as Paula D. Hunt posits, “The pages of consumer titles such as women’s magazines are storehouses of information about the values, social practices, and behaviors of the eras in which they were published.” 2 For both Cosmopolitan and Essence , as magazines that target women with information about dating, sexuality, and health, including sexual health, they are particularly ideal sites to examine how gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS were constructed in messaging specifically targeting women. Furthermore, because Cosmopolitan is a mainstream magazine, primarily targeting white women as their audience, and Essence is established specifically as a magazine for Black women who were overlooked in the general women’s glossies, a comparative analysis of the framing of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for their respective
audiences highlights the ways that race was central to constructions of heterosexual AIDS.
