Taking his cue from Simon Watney's view of a representational ‘crisis’ of the human body, Gilman's chapter, ‘The Beautiful Body and AIDS’, was centrally concerned, not with the effects of specific AIDS images on individual or collective behaviours, but rather, with the complex and often contradictory symbols present in the posters themselves. Accepting that AIDS posters were products of advertising (and not primarily parts of educational campaigns of governments or voluntary bodies), Gilman aimed at decoding them as ‘aestheticised’ veilings of the ugly realities of death and dying.