The racialisation of AIDS in Denmark: Tabloid media scandals of sex, race and contagion

In 1992, a Danish tabloid newspaper published the picture, name and address of a Black man on its front page under the title ‘He is the AIDS killer’. The outing marked the beginning of a controversial public scandal in Denmark directly leading to the introduction of a new law criminalising HIV in 1994. Centring questions of race and nationality in connection with HIV/AIDS, we examine in what ways the discursive framing of this, and two other public scandals, became tools of interpellation calling into existence ‘problematic’ and ‘dangerous’ groups like the racialised immigrant. Drawing on theories of race and racialisation through the work of Michel Foucault and Alexander G. Weheliye, we understand racism as structurally constituted within biopower and the violent expulsion of racialised people as a form of structural racism integrated in the state apparatus. Thinking about race in this way allows us to investigate how the figure of the racialised immigrant is represented vis-à-vis a racialised regime of representation as well as within a specific economy of fear and white paranoia. Our analysis shows that the racialisation of AIDS in Denmark, through which the control and disciplining of racialised bodies were made possible, worked in tandem with the cultural production of a national health crisis narrative that – put together – enabled, produced and pushed for particular political reactions and interventions culminating with the passing of the HIV Act in 1994.