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Seeking to render an invisible disease comprehensible, mass media and medical establishments in the first two decades of the United States AIDS epidemic presented “carriers” of HIV and AIDS as archetypal figures identifiable by way of their gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Yet even as artistic, literary, and activist responses combated this social partitioning, so did their contributions take the form of archetypal roles, including the saintly gay man suffering through his illness; the self-sacrificing lesbian caretaker; the mother as vector, and the dangerously duplicitous bisexual. This session will consider the narrativization of HIV/AIDS that persists across a broad spectrum of artistic responses to the epidemic, and analyze its dimensions in art and scholarship at the height of the crisis and to the present day. How were archetypes of people with HIV and AIDS forged, subverted, maintained, and shifted? Who is mourned and who is celebrated in recent, classicizing exhibitions including Art AIDS America? How are these curatorial decisions an outgrowth of narratives formed in those early years? We welcome papers from a variety of disciplines including performance, media, cultural, gender, queer, and critical race studies. Possible topics might include: the prevalence of healthy, white male subjects in narratives about HIV/AIDS and the contrasting absence of empathic depictions of black women and lesbian, bisexual, and trans subjects; discourses of pleasure coexisting with HIV/AIDS; the trope of the angelic dying body; ball culture and HIV/AIDS in popular representations; and the performativity of AIDS activism.