Bridging the HIV Divide: Stigma, Stories and Serodiscordant Sexuality in the Biomedical Age

• DOI: 10.1007/s12119-015-9316-z
• Publication Date: 2015-08-01T12:25:33Z
• Authors: Asha Persson; Jeanne Ellard; Christy E. Newman
• Keywords: anzsrc-for: 4405 Gender Studies; anzsrc-for: 4206 Public health; 3 Good Health and Well Being; 300; anzsrc-for: 1608 Sociology; 301; 3. Good health; 03 medical and health sciences; Infectious Diseases; 0302 clinical medicine; 5. Gender equality; Clinical Research; Sexually Transmitted Infections; HIV/AIDS; anzsrc-for: 44 Human Society; anzsrc-for: 2002 Cultural Studies; 4405 Gender Studies; 0305 other medical science; 10. No inequality; anzsrc-for: 4410 Sociology; 44 Human Society; anzsrc-for: 1117 Public Health and Health Services

At a time when advances in biomedicine have rendered people with HIV non-infectious under certain conditions, much public discourse on HIV remains stuck in a paradigm of ‘risk’, which does little to lessen the divide between people with and without HIV in society or challenge the way intimate relationships across this divide are typically stigmatised as undesirable and problematic. We rarely hear the stories of couples who live with mixed HIV statuses and how they themselves perceive and manage their so called ‘serodiscordance’. In this article, we examine such stories by mixed-status couples in Australia. In stark contrast to the dominant discourse, these couples invoked narratives of love, the everyday unimportance and manageability of HIV, and recent developments in HIV medicine, thereby challenging the way serodiscordant sexuality has been cast in public health research. Drawing on Ken Plummer’s work on hidden sexual stories, we consider not only the content of their stories, but the broader significance of stories to the world in which they are enacted, of storytelling as a rally for social and political recognition and legitimacy. Reflecting on our own role in the co-production of research stories, we argue that by moving marginalised sexual stories out of silence, stigmatised communities and researchers can conjointly and incrementally shape a new public discourse and new forms of ‘intimate citizenship’.