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

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.