Iperstoria is a Class A multilingual, international, blind peer-reviewed biannual journal focusing on English and American Studies with a multidisciplinary / transdisciplinary approach.
Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università degli studi di Verona
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We kindly ask authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.
English for Legal Studies. Giulia Adriana Pennisi
Review of English for Legal Studies by Giulia Adriana Pennisi.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Borsetto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Italian American Poetics of Place: An Environmental Perspective. Sabrina Vellucci
Review of Italian American Poetics of Place: An Environmental Perspective by Sabrina Vellucci.
Copyright (c) 2026 Carla Francellini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article focuses on the Trask family and on the parallels between the two generations of Trask brothers and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck’s rewriting of this episode reframes the meaning of such a story, proposing a new reading of Cain as a penitent rather than as an archetype of fratricide. The concept of ‘timshel’ allows the author to explore the theme of the struggle between good and evil, and to highlight the human power embedded in the possibility of choosing how to act and react. The analysis begins with the contextualization of the story of Cain and Abel in the novel East of Eden, then proceeds to expose the links between the biblical characters and the ones written by Steinbeck, relating the ways in which the latter are symbolic representations of the former, with a deep insight into the first and second generations of the Trask brothers. Thereafter, the essay analyses some of the male characters of East of Eden and the different kinds of virility they express. It delves into their understanding of the concepts of virility and violence, and how those notions influence the parental duties and, by extension, family bonds, fueling sibling rivalry. The last section of the article deepens the topic of the human conflict between good and evil and its universality, returning to the concept of ‘timshel’ and showing how the characters face the internal struggle.
Articles (general section) - American language, literature, and culture
Copyright (c) 2026 Simona Golia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il romanzo americano. Storia, forme, canoni. A cura di Giorgio Mariani
Review of Il romanzo americano. Storia, forme, canoni, edited by Giorgio Mariani.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rachele Puddu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This contribution provides a reflection on life writing in contexts of conflict and violence through an interview with Professor Emeritus Brian K. Barber (University of Tennessee), who published a book offering first-hand insight about life in Gaza during the Israeli occupation and the genocide.
Copyright (c) 2026 Serena Demichelis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Femininities and Masculinities across Contemporary Discourses
Introduction to the Special Issue "Languaging and Representing Femininities and Masculinities."
Copyright (c) 2026 Giorgia Riboni, Angela Zottola, Helen Ringrow https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction to the Special Section “Parties, Luxury and American Celebrity: From Gatsby to Instagram.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Clericuzio, Cinzia Schiavini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Translating Tourism. Stefania M. Maci and Cinzia G. Spinzi
Review of Translating Tourism by Stefania M. Maci and Cinzia G. Spinzi.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Ivana Lorenzetti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. Sarah Ensor
Review of Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valentina Romanzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Religious Tourism in a Key Multimodal Discourse Analysis Perspective
In the last few decades, religious tourism has become a relevant sector for the international tourism industry, with pilgrimages counting 240 million travelers per year. These figures increase during specific events, as is the case with the Catholic Jubilee, which was held in Rome in 2025. In order to investigate the communicative strategies used to promote major pilgrimage destinations, the present study conducts a visual and verbal analysis of the official Jubilee 2025 website. More specifically, the study investigates its homepage and the web pages dedicated to Exhibitions, presented as cultural and spiritual preparation for the main event. The visual analysis employs Baldry and Thibault’s (2006) model to examine the intertextual relationships and meaning-making functions of the homepage and the web pages, while Dann’s (1996) framework is used to investigate patterns of tourism discourse in the verbal component of the Exhibitions’ web pages. The research objective is to examine the communicative strategies used by the Holy See to articulate the Jubilee’s spiritual significance within the broader landscape of contemporary travel. It specifically analyzes how the Vatican navigates the tension between mass mobility and spiritual pilgrimage, following Pope Francis’s pastoral call to transform the ‘tourist’ experience into a ‘pilgrim’ journey. Findings reveal that the website constructs the Jubilee as a hybrid experience situated between sacred pilgrimage and cultural tourism. Visual and verbal choices frame participation in the Exhibitions as a symbolic journey of preparation, aligning cultural engagement as integral to the spiritual path with promotional conventions typical of tourism communication.
Articles (general section) - English language and linguistics
Copyright (c) 2026 Daniela Cesiri, Ninfa Pagano, Walter Spezzano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This contribution provides an overview of the recent events that affected the Department of Education as well as higher education in the United States since the beginning of President Trump’s second term. The second part of the article presents an interview with Ivy Wilson, Board of Visitors Professor at Northwestern University.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rachele Puddu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Although often perceived as carrying little authoritative influence, dissenting judicial opinions are increasingly recognised as critical instruments where judges articulate alternative legal interpretations that may become future doctrine. This forward-looking function creates a distinctive rhetorical imperative: dissenters must strategically select language to maximise persuasive impact across time, ensuring lasting influence on judicial evolution. Among the persuasive resources available to dissenting judges, emotional appeals prove particularly potent, as they render institutional failures viscerally comprehensible and morally intolerable in ways that purely doctrinal argumentation cannot achieve. This article therefore examines the strategic deployment of pathos-laden segments – the third of Aristotle’s three persuasive means – in dissenting judicial opinions from gender-based violence cases at the European Court of Human Rights. Drawing on a 33,000-token corpus of dissenting opinions addressing feminicide, domestic violence, and sexual violence cases issued between 2012 and 2024, this study undertakes a qualitative textual analysis integrating Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory with Aristotelian rhetoric to analyse how evaluative language functions as a textual mechanism for generating specific emotions central to judicial persuasion. The analysis reveals that dissenting judges strategically use three attitudinal resources to build a tripartite emotional architecture that transforms readers from detached legal observers into morally compelled advocates for reform. Ultimately, findings also demonstrate that dissenting opinions in gender-based violence cases are not neutral vessels of legal reasoning but sophisticated rhetorical artifacts that balance formalist argumentation with affective engagement.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ilaria Giordano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“What Does that Tune Mean?” Il significato della musica nei romanzi di Richard Powers. Stefano Franceschini
Recensione di "What Does that Tune Mean?". Il significato della musica nei romanzi di Richard Powers di Stefano Franceschini.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Petrelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Martin Luther King Jr. Ribelle nonviolento. Gabriella Lavina
Recensione de Martin Luther King Jr. Ribelle nonviolento di Gabriella Lavina.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valerio Spositi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Americani di seconda classe. La dialettica del Melting Pot in Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan e John Fante. Enrico Mariani
Recensione de Americani di Seconda Classe. La dialettica del Melting Pot in Louis Adamic, Carlos Bulosan e John Fante di Enrico Mariani.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francesco Chianese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite not conforming to a traditional Western story, John Fante’s second novel Ask the Dust (1939) re-evokes and subverts traditional tropes and symbols associated with the history and mythology of the American West and its quintessential spatial dimension of the Frontier. Focusing on its anti-heroic characters and the imaginative frontiers they construct, the essay interprets Fante’s novel as a work that reconfigures the mythic foundations of the American conquest while laying bare the violent colonial mechanisms that sustain them. Moving from the grotesque portrayal of the sick, idle, and senescent Anglo characters represented in the novel as products of the failed myth of renewal promised by the Frontier, the analysis then turns to the Italian American protagonist and aspiring writer Arturo Bandini and his conflicted and obsessive relationship with the Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez. Interpreted as an imaginative re-enactment of the colonial process of continental conquest, Arturo’s obsessive and fetishized desire for Camilla becomes the key to reading Fante’s novel as a post-Frontier Western. The essay proposes a reading of Ask the Dust as a work that both draws upon and dismantles the mythical foundations of the American Frontier, anticipating the revisionist impulse that would begin to reshape the Western genre from the 1960s.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Acqualagna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Representation of Female Pain in Medical Academic Discourse
Health care professionals within the scientific community have long ignored or minimized vulvar pain, a condition estimated to affect one in ten people with a vulva. In recent years, this issue has received increased attention and is currently undergoing a process of pathologization, i.e., it is being officially recognized as a disease by medical institutions. The term “vulvodynia” has been introduced to label and confer pathological status to this chronic pain condition, although adequate categorization is still lacking. Drawing on theories of the collective understanding of illness, which view discursive constructions as tools for shaping societal perceptions of legitimacy and credibility in relation to health conditions, this paper argues that the invisibilization of vulvar pain and vulvodynia stems from the broader issue of devaluing women and their experiences. This study investigates the linguistic and discursive resources employed within scientific discourse to construct, frame, and (de)legitimize vulvodynia and vulvodynia patients in scholarly literature. A corpus-assisted approach is adopted to explore the evolving representations of vulvar pain and vulvodynia in medical discourse. An ad hoc dataset of scientific articles published in English over the past 25 years has been compiled and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, aiming to contribute to a deeper understanding of how language shapes the reality of invisible pathologies and may ultimately lead to discriminatory practices.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giorgia Riboni, Angela Zottola https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay offers a critical analysis of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (1964), proposing a conceptual frame that establishes a structural isomorphism between the acts of swimming and writing. Both are construed as disciplined, rhythmically regulated practices that demand a delicate balance between instinct and control, sustaining narrative continuity even as moments of disruption emerge, and moving between sensory immersion and reflective detachment. The analysis situates Cheever’s narrative within the broader tradition of the short story, conceptualizing the form as a pliant formal apparatus uniquely attuned to articulating the fleeting, and disjunctive qualities of twentieth-century subjectivity, as well as the epistemological instabilities of contemporary experience. Within this framework, swimming is approached simultaneously as lived, embodied practice and as a symbolic and structural device. The protagonist’s aquatic journey is thus examined not only as a physical undertaking, but also as a stratified narrative operation through which existential dislocation, mnemonic drift, and the fluidity of identity are staged. Water – at once an emblematic motif and an immersive setting – emerges as a liminal space onto which individual memory and collective cultural tensions are projected, particularly those rooted within the ideological topographies of postwar American suburbia.
Copyright (c) 2026 Chiara Battisti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study investigates how climate activism has been represented in two major British newspapers, The Guardian (2015-2023) and The Telegraph (2020-2023). Drawing on a purpose-built corpus of over 1.4 million words and employing a corpus-based discourse analytic approach, the research explores diachronic shifts and cross-newspaper differences in the portrayal of activist groups Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. The analysis focuses on the linguistic framing of activists in building the narratives surrounding climate action. Results reveal that The Guardian’s discourse has evolved from event-based reporting towards a more activist-centred and solidarity-driven narrative, increasingly linking climate activism to social justice issues and broadening its evaluative framing to include both supportive and more critical views. The Telegraph, instead, primarily frames activism in terms of disruption, legality, and public order concerns, without much emphasis on the activists’ social or ideological motivations. Word Sketch analyses of the terms activist(s) and protester(s) further confirm the different evaluative patterns and orientations of the two publications. The trends observed point to the need for further critical investigation of the framing of activists in the media and of its role in polarising public opinion, influencing the debate on policies and defining the role of protest in democratic societies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gloria Cappelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Discourse Markers in National and European Parliamentary Debates
Parliamentary discourse follows both cooperative and conflict-driven communication strategies. This paper explores whether and how such intents are pursued by discourse markers (DMs) in parliamentary speeches. To this aim, four types of DMs in national and European parliamentary debates are focused on: “and so on and so forth” and “and things like that” (vague category markers); “as I was saying” and “in other words” (reformulation devices); “(do) you know what?” and “you know what I mean” (sharedness markers), and “after all” and “at the end of the day” (summarising tokens). The ParlaMint and Europarl spoken corpora available in the Sketch Engine platform are consulted. This paper not only investigates DMs’ usages in context, frequencies and pragmatics, but it also examines possible Italian equivalents and English synonyms, thus highlighting differences and/or similarities. The findings indicate discrepancies between national and European DMs. Particularly, there is variability in the types, usages, and occurrence rates of DMs across the corpora and in the two languages. At times, the European corpora produce greater frequencies of some DMs, whereas national parliamentary debates show notable percentage values in others, although to a lesser degree. Moreover, literature-sourced Italian equivalents of English DMs are not always found in the corpora, which generate other or fewer multi-words. The study also finds that the Europarl dataset yields varied English synonymous DMs.
Copyright (c) 2026 Patrizia Giampieri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Midlife Prosodies at the Age-Gender Interface
Middle age remains an understudied life stage, as research has long prioritised the young-old divide and sidelined the middle decades despite their centrality in the life course. Although recent scholarly and cultural debates suggest renewed interest in this period, these developments coexist with persistent ageism, whose gendered nature is well established: middle‑aged women are evaluated more harshly than men, especially in relation to appearance, behaviour, and social expectations. This study investigates the labels middle‑aged and midlife in a large corpus of English discourse to examine how they are applied to women and men, and whether they reproduce, negotiate, or challenge dominant stereotypes. Drawing on work in ageism and gendered ageing, and treating age labels as categorisation devices, the analysis adopts a corpus‑based approach to explore how discourse shapes shared representations of middle age. The findings show that stereotypical and chrononormative portrayals dominate: women are disproportionately linked to decline‑oriented framings, while men appear in more varied but still norm‑reinforcing depictions. Emerging alternative representations – primarily associated with the label midlife, though not used exclusively in reframing contexts – signal some diversification, yet remain too scattered to amount to a meaningful redefinition. Moreover, the very need to rename middle age in order to reframe it suggests that negative representations persist alongside more positive ones, with traits associated with the latter running the risk of imposing new forms of chrononormativity as constraining as those they attempt to replace.
Copyright (c) 2026 Paola Catenaccio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The global geopolitical situation has been characterised by numerous crises in recent years, posing new challenges to EU governments and the US. Owing to the ensuing international instability, Trump’s inflammatory 2024 presidential campaign turned traditional rhetoric into an attempt to restore what he portrayed as the golden age. Set against this context, the present work analyses three main issues highlighted by the tycoon during the 2024 US campaign: the deteriorating effects of Biden’s administration, transgender people and immigration. To this end, 61 speeches delivered by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign have been collected into a corpus and examined through the tools provided by Sketch Engine, with the purpose of discussing the semantic and metaphorical aspects of keywords and collocational clusters. Subsequently, drawing on Wodak’s (2011) theoretical frameworks, this research dwells on Trump’s employment of disclaimers, rhetorical strategies used to justify policies of exclusion in the name of national safety and identity. The identification of a specific lexicon offers insights into Trump’s metaphors, examined from the perspective of the conceptual blending theory suggested by Charteris-Black (2018) and developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). The analysis of linguistic and rhetorical elements builds on Wodak’s (2011) theories of discursive strategies to determine how Trump frames American society in dichotomic terms (Fairclough 2003). Finally, the study aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the tycoon’s replication of many rhetorical and linguistic strategies from his first campaign, his ‘bombastic’ 2024 campaign enabled him to gain momentum as a political celebrity and to be regarded as the forerunner of a return to the golden age.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michele Russo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Recent research has highlighted the potential of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to support the development of ESP writing skills. However, concerns have also emerged about learners delegating writing tasks to these tools, potentially undermining learners’ motivation and autonomy. LLMs’ capacity to generate human-like text challenges the ability to ensure the authenticity of EFL students’ writing. Some studies have investigated LLM-generated text characteristics, comparing them with student writing. However, research on LLMs in EFL education remains limited. This paper seeks to address this gap and advance critical understanding of LLM-generated text. It reports on a small-scale study comparing three corpora: genuine undergraduate EFL student essays, suspected LLM-generated essays, and texts produced by ChatGPT 4.0 and DeepSeek-V3. The study examined patterns of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in the essays. Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation, it was found that although interactive features have limited explanatory power in distinguishing between LLM-generated text and genuine student essays, LLMs place strong emphasis on explicit cohesion, coherence and logical organization, favoring an objective and factual style. Most importantly, while they approximate human stance-taking, LLMs show very limited capacity to model audience and engage readers. This pattern was mirrored in the essays suspected to be LLM-generated. In contrast, genuine student writing was found to display a more personal tone and substantially greater reader engagement, regardless of target language proficiency.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Bagni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Truman Capote’s Mid-Century Subversive Celebrity
Truman Capote is one of the most controversial American writers of the post-WWII years, gaining more attention and fame for his persona than for his literary output. Though his celebrity has lasted for decades and has grown at each new project, this paper concentrates on the years preceding – and the time of – the publication of his first novel in 1948. Portraying explicitly gender-bending characters, Other Voices, Other Rooms has fallen into the category of Southern Grotesque, a style that has sheltered his and other Southern writers’ output from the ostracism met by Gore Vidal’s contemporary gay-themed novel, The City and the Pillar. The paper thus addresses the nexus between sexuality and celebrity at a time when homophobia, in the United States, was at its highest peak. Capote’s exploitation of his personal queerness, mirrored in the novel, has granted him fast-track fame, confirming his ability to capitalize on the spectacularization of queer elements.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Clericuzio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film (2023) has attracted much attention within and outside of academia, although research from a linguistic perspective has not to date been extensive. Barbie is a satirical, subversive comedy and key themes include patriarchy, feminism, gender roles, beauty standards, capitalism, existentialism, and unrealistic expectations placed on women. Towards the end of the film, the character Gloria, played by America Ferrera, gives an impassioned speech related to the paradoxes of gendered societal pressures to which women are often subjected, and this becomes a turning point for the narrative. The monologue is conceptualised here as a form of telecinematic discourse. The focus of this paper is predominantly on applying Aristotelian rhetorical strategies (especially appeals to pathos and logos) to the speech, considering how the linguistic techniques are intended to provoke an emotional response in the audience(s). The analysis is situated within relevant literature on constructions of both femininities and feminisms, especially the film’s relationship to popular feminism and consumption.
Copyright (c) 2026 Helen Ringrow https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study investigates the linguistic construction of generational personae and how they are framed in news discourse. To achieve this, a corpus of British newspaper articles has been collected and analysed using corpus-based methodologies (Baker 2023; Egbert and Baker 2020; Egbert et al. 2020; Baker and McEnery 2015). By adopting a Critical Discourse Studies approach (Fairclough 2003) and drawing on the tools of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005), the investigation has revealed how attitudinal meanings help shape and reflect societal perceptions of different generations, at times contributing to what Lumby (2001) defines as ‘generation panics,’ that is, discursive surges of public anxiety that destabilise conventional understandings of age as a cultural and social category. This study additionally explores matters pertaining to masculinity and femininity, focusing on their intersection with generational representations. Furthermore, the following investigation addresses a gap in corpus-based research on generational discourse, where large-scale analyses rarely integrate Appraisal Theory with News Values to explain how evaluations become newsworthy. In this way, by focusing on (Baby) Boomers and Millennials – i.e., the two cohorts that most saliently structure media debates in our corpus – the present study shows how evaluative meanings align with news values to (re)produce ideological framings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Antonio Fruttaldo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Celebrity, Punk, Time, Nostalgia, and the Unpredictable Trajectories of Fame in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
The paper investigates the pursuit, the pitfalls and the unexpected trajectories of fame in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). In the novel, celebrity, its pursuit and its loss are crucial in the main plot emerging from the thirteen interlinked storylines that delineate the countercultural context of the punk-rock scene from the 1970s to the present – most of which investigate the forms and meanings of celebrity in the transition towards the dematerializaton of experience with the advent of the new media. What is the relation between art, fame, and real and virtual identities in the transition from the “world of objects and venues” to the iPod era? Can celebrity be part of a countercultural universe, or can it be only a vicarious accomplishment? How are the vestiges of the old celebrity world reshaped in the era of instant fame? To what extent can artistic/aesthetic value shift from its content to its circulation and dissemination? The paper investigates celebrity and its corollaries at the turn of the millennium as depicted in Egan’s novel: the craving for eternal youth and the immortalizing thriving of fame and its symbols; the relation between fame and the celebrity’s body; the forms and fate of authenticity in the new mediascapes and systems of consumption.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cinzia Schiavini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay aims to bridge the gap between gender, periodical, and translation studies by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that emphasises the role of language and translation in the discursive construction of female identity in women’s magazines when these texts are transferred into other languages and disseminated across different cultures. It also seeks to shed new light on the often-overlooked genre of the female fashion article as a mediator of gender ideologies in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Corpus methodology is employed to conduct a contrastive analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – of the linguistic representation of femininity in the American and French editions of 1920s Vogue, focusing primarily on the titles of the magazine’s extensive fashion features, which were originally written in English and subsequently translated or adapted into French. An examination of the meanings and associations underlying naming and referential strategies related to discourses of womanhood in Vogue US and Vogue France reveals that both editions consistently promoted the same elevated standard of femininity, linguistically construed in terms of fashionability, modernity, originality, and distinction. However, the widespread use of creative and culturally adaptive strategies, as well as rewriting in Vogue France, resulted in an overall loss of emphasis on the identification of womanliness with French fashion culture. Moreover, the rich connotations carried by recurrent lexical items in the English titles – including those evoking female agency – are frequently attenuated or lost in translation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Annalisa Federici https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Masculinity, Identity and Mental Health in the Digital Age
Social media platforms have emerged as prominent spaces for individuals with mental health issues to share personal experiences, seek information and peer support (Naslund et al. 2020; Bucci, Schwannauer and Berry 2019; Berry et al. 2017). These digital environments facilitate open discussions among users facing mental health challenges and help reduce stigma (Cheng 2024). The present study investigates digital discourses on mental health and well-being, with a particular focus on the representation of male mental health on social media. By analysing a corpus of Reddit posts, it explores the influence of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) on users’ perceptions and discursive practices. Grounded in Critical Discourse Studies (Wodak and Meyer 2016; Fairclough 2003) and corpus-based approaches (Baker 2023; Hunt and Brookes 2020), the study aims to advance understanding of the intersection between masculinity and mental health in online environments, while also investigating how social media discourses contribute to shaping representations of male mental health and evolving gender conceptualisations (Balirano and Borba 2020).
Copyright (c) 2026 Maria De Santo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The AIDS epidemic has always been closely connected to media representation, particularly with regard to the identification of AIDS as a gay problem, which the press established from the beginning. This equivalence heavily affected how AIDS would be perceived in popular culture. This article analyzes the dynamics governing a less investigated aspect of this intersection between AIDS and popular culture, that is, the triangle of 1950s Hollywood stars at the center of the mainstream narrative of the AIDS epidemic: Ronald Reagan, who held office during the worst years of the crisis, Rock Hudson, whose death in 1985 caused a shift in the visibility of the disease, and Elizabeth Taylor, who rapidly became the world’s best-known AIDS activist. While queer artists and activists did most of the heavy lifting (and of the suffering) when it comes to AIDS, this triangle of Hollywood stars managed to frame most of the mainstream narrative reaching those not directly affected, as their fame fed America’s interest in the epidemic. The article focuses on the dynamics at work that allowed the different aspects of American popular culture, mainly 1950s themes and anxieties surrounding sexuality and the Cold War, to intersect with AIDS media representation. Investigating the Hollywood triangle Taylor-Hudson-Reagan, the article highlights the discrepancies between the mainstream narrative and the underground queer narratives of the time, revealing how this tension shaped AIDS as the first pop culture epidemic.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0