At risk to be modern? HIV, cinema and the biopolitics of Indian masculinity

Bibliographic Data

ID23310889
AuthorsPurbita Das (0000-0002-4993-1602, Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pagesmedhum-2026-013916
Publication date2026-07-31
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedical Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-215X • E-ISSN: 1473-4265
PublisherBMJ (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1136/medhum-2026-013916
PMID42538156
OpenAlexW7171924939
LanguageEN
References cited19

This article examines how early 21st-century Indian short films reconfigure masculinity in the wake of economic liberalisation, non-governmental organisation-led public health interventions and the AIDS crisis. Reading Vishal Bhardwaj’s Blood Brothers (2007) and Farhan Akhtar’s Positive (2007) as cultural texts produced within pharmaceutical capitalism, the paper argues that these films do more than raise HIV awareness: they participate in the making of a biopolitical masculinity that ties male identity to risk management, medical compliance and therapeutic responsibility. Drawing on medical humanities, masculinity studies and Vinh-Kim Nguyen’s concept of ‘therapeutic citizenship’ (2005), the article demonstrates how condom use, antiretroviral therapy and self-surveillance are framed as moral and civic obligations, rendering men governable, productive and socially legible. At the same time, these films negotiate older Hindu masculine ideals of restraint, family protection and bodily discipline, producing a tense overlap between renunciatory ethics and neoliberal imperatives of consumption and pleasure. Through close visual analysis, the paper traces how shame, guilt and responsibility circulate as affects that must be managed, displaced or transformed in order to sustain this new masculine order. By situating these films within India’s HIV landscape, the paper advances medical humanities scholarship on gender and health and opens new avenues for studying how cinematic narratives shape the emotional and ethical labour of becoming a ‘therapeutic’ male citizen in contemporary India.

Alterity · Biopower · Hegemonic masculinity · Masculinity · Movie theater · Narrative · Privilege (computing) · Public health · Scholarship · Cinema and Media Studies · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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