AIDS reception: the contamination of AIDS by social discourses

Abstract

This text tries to show, as reception theories have pointed out many times, that any interpretation is a textual construction too, and that therefore much what people have to say about AIDS, for instance, is derived from discourses initially elaborated by the media. In the case of newspapers, three spaces in particular are the main sources for those constructions: the editorial page, the readers’ letters section and signed articles in general.