A Persson
Biographic Data
| ID | 46733 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Persson |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Persson |
| SIGNATURE | PERSSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1173-4697 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 293 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
This Vaccine is Not for Us’: Christianity, Colonialism, Conspiracies, and Covid-19 Vaccine Beliefs in Papua New Guinea
Vaccine hesitancy is considered a growing problem worldwide. In Papua New Guinea, the vaccine for the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was met with extraordinary fear and antipathy, resulting in one of the world’s lowest rates of COVID-19 vaccination. Not only were there concerns about the vaccine’s safety, it was also perceived as a grave threat to sovereignty and religious faith. We draw on 131 qualitative interviews with health service clie…
Tuberculosis treatment and undernutrition on Daru Island, Papua New Guinea: A qualitative exploration of a local foodscape
A substantial proportion of people with tuberculosis (TB)-one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases-live in resource-poor, food insecure settings. It is widely recognised that undernutrition significantly heightens vulnerability to TB, as well as contributes to poor treatment adherence and outcomes. However, more attention is needed to understand what shapes food insecurity and undernutrition in a particular setting. We use the concept of …
"Local Pathways of "Serodiscordant Couples: Unpacking a Global HIV Population Category in Papua New Guinea
HIV prevention programs focus on global "key populations" and more localized "priority populations" to ensure effective targeting of interventions. These HIV population categories have been subject to considerable scholarly scrutiny, particularly key populations, with less attention given to critically unpacking priority populations at local levels, for example "serodiscordant couples" (one partner has HIV, but not the other). We examine this pop…
Logics of control and self-management in narratives of people living with HIV, hepatitis C and hepatitis B
In Australia, the response to HIV, hepatitis C and hepatitis B has largely been through the constructed category of 'blood borne viruses' which treats these viruses as an interconnected set of conditions with respect to their mode of transmission. In this paper, we explore how people understand their viral infection, and compare the logics underpinning these different understandings. In-depth interviews were conducted with 61 participants who wer…
Heart cracked open: From personal loss to radical mourning
In this article, I consider the point that grief is politically potent because it seeks connections through a recognition of shared embodied precariousness and suffering. Bereavement, as is well-documented, can be transformative; it can bring about personal growth, but it can also create bonds with others in a similar situation, rallying communities into political action through shared grief or injustice. In a world where some lives are considere…
Professional perspectives on serodiscordant family service provision in the context of blood-borne viruses
In recognition of the broader relational aspects of viral infections, family support is considered important when someone is diagnosed with a blood-borne virus (BBV), such as HIV, hepatitis C (HCV) and hepatitis B (HBV). However, families' own support needs are often not a priority in service provision within the BBV sector. In this article, we draw on qualitative interviews with 20 key informants working in various professional capacities in hea…
The freighted social histories of HIV and hepatitis C: Exploring service providers’ perspectives on stigma in the current epidemics
A virus has a social history. In the case of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV, this history is one involving stigma and discrimination, advocacy and activism, and recent dramatic improvements in treatment. These social histories influence the experience of people who live with the viruses, and those who work with them. One aspect of this is the impact of social changes on the biographical disruption and integration brought about by illness. He…
We Live Just Like a Normal Family”: Exploring Local Renderings of the Global HIV Normalisation Discourse Among Serodiscordant Couples in Papua New Guinea
The contemporary global discourse of “HIV normalisation” is intimately linked to the scientific consensus that, with effective antiretroviral therapy, an “undetectable” viral load renders HIV “non-infectious” and “untransmittable” between sexual partners. Beyond this correlation, HIV normality is rarely defined, leaving the impression that it is an objective and universally applicable phenomenon. But what does normality mean in settings where the…
Belonging, social connection and non‐clinical care: Experiences of HIV peer support among recently diagnosed people living with HIV in Australia
Effective HIV treatments have transformed the medical needs of people living with HIV (PLHIV) to a chronic condition. However, stigma, poorer mental health outcomes and social isolation remain significant challenges for many PLHIV. HIV peer support programs have assisted PLHIV in navigating the clinical, emotional and social aspects of living with HIV. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 recently diagnosed PLHIV in Australia to explore …
Understanding 'risk' in families living with mixed blood-borne viral infection status: The doing and undoing of 'difference
Risk' has long been at the centre of expert and popular perceptions of transmissible and stigmatised blood-borne viral infections, such as HIV and viral hepatitis. There is a substantial body of research on transmission risk among couples with mixed viral infection status (serodiscordance). But we know very little about how families affected by HIV and viral hepatitis engage with understandings of infectiousness and how these shape family relatio…
Making Sense of Serodiscordance: Pathways and Aftermaths of HIV Testing among Couples with Mixed HIV Status in Papua New Guinea
The World Health Organization has emphasised the importance of HIV testing for couples as part of a global strategy to support the HIV prevention needs of couples, particularly those whose test results are ‘serodiscordant’ (one partner is diagnosed HIV-positive, the other HIV-negative). Studies have focused on motivations and barriers to testing together as a couple. However, this provides only partial insights into a bigger and often more comple…
Caring Masculinities in the Context of HIV Serodiscordant Relationships in Papua New Guinea
Globally, there is limited research exploring the positive role men play in reducing HIV vulnerability or in the care and support of women living with HIV. This paper draws on interviews conducted with men and women in heterosexual HIV serodiscordant relationships as part of a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the social aspects of biomedicine among serodiscordant couples in two high HIV-burden areas in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Findings hig…
Family imaginaries in the disclosure of a blood-borne virus
Contemporary sociological work has emphasised that family is not static, but actively shaped by ideas of who and what makes family. Disclosure of an illness, including diagnosis of stigmatised infections such as HIV, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, can change the dynamics of family relationships. This paper draws on 61 qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019 with people in Australia with one or more of thes…
Polygyny, Serodiscordance and HIV Prevention in Papua New Guinea: A Qualitative Exploration of Diverse Configurations
Polygyny is practised in vastly different cultural contexts, including in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The literature is contradictory, arguing that polygyny is either protective against HIV or a critical risk factor. Neither argument accounts for the diversity of polygyny. Even less attention has been paid to polygynous marriages with mixed HIV status (serodiscordance). This paper draws on a longitudinal study of the socio-cultural aspects of biomedi…
Experience as Evidence: The Prospects for Biographical Narratives in Drug Policy
Programs and policies are increasingly framed by the logics of “evidence-based policy,” a term subject to critical scrutiny and change after it emerged as an explicit valuing of specific types of quantitative data as objective, and a devaluing of most types of qualitative data. The transfer of “evidence-based” approaches to drug policy was mobilized by a distrust of people who use drugs, and of people who work with them. This distrust remains imp…
Mapping Experiences of Serodiscordance: Using Visual Methodologies to Construct Relationality in Families Living With or Affected by Stigmatized Infectious Disease
The "my health, our family" research project was established to document stories of what serodiscordance (mixed infection status) means for Australian families affected by HIV, hepatitis B, and/or hepatitis C. A family mapping exercise was developed for the start of interviews as a way to conceptualize serodiscordance as a movement of "closeness" and "distance" within the relational networks that participants defined as "family," the outcome of w…
The 'normality' of living as a gay serodiscordant couple in Sydney, Australia
Serodiscordant couples are often understood through a discourse of HIV-risk or researched in terms of the psychological stressors they face. However, due to antiretroviral treatments people living with HIV can achieve undetectable viral loads, which not only make them non-infectious to partners, but allow them to think of their lives and relationships as safe and viable. These realisations mean that serodiscordant couples often embrace an HIV 'no…
Queerying Notions of “Difference” Among Two Generations of Australians Who Do Not Identify Heteronormatively
The embodied relationality of blood-borne viruses: How families matter in the context of a stigmatised viral infection
Challenging Perceptions of 'Straight: Heterosexual Men Who Have Sex with Men and the Cultural Politics of Sexual Identity Categories
Research shows that some heterosexually identified men engage in sex with men; however, they remain largely hidden and little understood. Despite long-standing scholarly recognition that sexual identity and orientation do not always neatly coincide, the culturally normative heterosexual/homosexual binary tends to shape mainstream perceptions of such men as well as render them invisible in sexual health systems reliant on stable sexual identity ca…
Vibrant Entanglements: HIV Biomedicine and Serodiscordant Couples in Papua New Guinea
The global ambition to "end AIDS" hinges on the universal uptake of HIV treatment-as-prevention and is undergirded by the assumption that biomedical technologies have consistent, predictable effects across highly diverse settings. But as anthropologists argue, such technologies are actively transformed by their local encounters, with various constitutive effects. How priority populations, such as HIV "serodiscordant" couples, negotiate treatment-…
Hidden carers? A scoping review of the needs of carers of people with HIV in the contemporary treatment era
The role of carers in supporting people with HIV is largely hidden in Western countries in the contemporary era of antiretroviral treatments. Little is known about their needs. A scoping review was undertaken to describe the research available on the needs of this group and identify gaps in existing knowledge. Findings reveal that carers of people with HIV have similar needs to other carers but are currently mostly invisible to support services. …
Promoting ‘Equitable Access’ to PrEP in Australia: Taking Account of Stakeholder Perspectives
Sexual Practices and Sexual Health Among Three Generations of Men in Bangladesh: Exploring Gender- and Sexuality-Assemblages
When HIV Figures in Family Life: Exploring the Relational Reach of Serodiscordance
Making monsters: Heterosexuality, crime and race in recent Western media coverage of HIV
In the early HIV epidemic, Western media coverage encouraged the idea that infection was linked to ‘other’ identities located outside the ‘mainstream’; outside ‘proper’ heterosexuality. Today, however, HIV has become repositioned as a global heterosexual epidemic. Analyses show that since the 1990s Western media have shifted away from blame and hysteria to an increasingly routinised reporting of HIV as a health story and social justice issue. But…
Non/infectious corporealities: Tensions in the biomedical era of 'HIV normalisation
In the contemporary HIV epidemic, antiretroviral treatments are increasingly considered so effective at viral suppression that they render people with HIV sexually non-infectious. With its radical implications for global HIV prevention, this emerging paradigm is invested with the potential to turn the epidemic around and to 'normalise' one of the most feared infectious diseases in history, thus echoing wider trends of 'biomedicalisation'. What re…
Incorporating Pharmakon: HIV, Medicine, and Body Shape Change
Invested with the capacity to reinstate physiological order, medicines are at the centre of contemporary health care. Their purpose and efficacy are generally seen as predictable and concrete: disease = therapy = outcome. These culturally specific understandings shape the practices and meanings of taking medicines. This article, however, queries what actually takes place when human bodies and medical drugs converge. Is it a solely therapeutic aff…
Facing HIV: Body Shape Change and the (in)Visibility of Illness
Illness is commonly invested with considerable stigma because of its tendency to evoke charged meanings around corporeality, selfhood, suffering, and mortality. Perhaps more than any contemporary disease HIV/AIDS has served as a powerful signifier for a range of cultural anxieties. Given the resultant stigma, HIV becomes very much a question of visibility. This article explores the visibility of HIV within the Sydney gay community with reference …
The world has changed: Pharmaceutical citizenship and the reimagining of serodiscordant sexuality among couples with mixedHIVstatus in Australia
In this article, I revisit the question of whetherHIVcan ever be reimagined and re-embodied as a potentially non-infectious condition, drawing on a current qualitative study of couples with mixedHIVstatus (serodiscordance) in Australia. Recent clinical trials have consolidated a shift in scientific understandings ofHIVinfectiousness by showing that antiretroviral treatment effectively prevents the sexual transmission ofHIV. Contrary to common cri…
HIV Health in Context: Negotiating Medical Technology and Lived Experience
Biomedical constructions of health and illness as objective categories have long been challenged by social theorists. As part of this critique, an analytic distinction is made between the domains of doctors and patients to highlight differences in perspective and power. Illness narratives and phenomenological studies foreground how patient experiences and understandings of health are complex, socially embedded and often conflict with medical mode…
On the Margins of Pharmaceutical Citizenship: Not Taking HIV Medication in the "Treatment Revolution" Era
With the expanding pharmaceuticalization of public health, anthropologists have begun to examine how biomedicine's promissory discourses of normalization and demarginalization give rise to new practices of and criteria for citizenship. Much of this work focuses on the biomedicine-citizenship nexus in less-developed, resource-poor contexts. But how do we understand this relationship in resource-rich settings where medicines are readily available, …
Bridging the HIV Divide: Stigma, Stories and Serodiscordant Sexuality in the Biomedical Age
Intimate immensity: Phenomenology of place and space in an Australian yoga community
This article is a dialogue between Edward Casey's theory of place and an ethnographic case study of Satyananda Yoga practice in Australia. At issue is Casey's claim that embodied being-in-the-world is irrevocably dependent on a sense of place for its own existential coherence and, conversely, that placeless space inspires terror. This claim is partly rendered problematic by the ethnographic material, which details how Satyananda yogis enact a ran…
"Vulnerability, gender and "proxy negativity: Women in relationships with HIV-positive men in Australia
Challenging Perceptions of 'Straight: Heterosexual Men Who Have Sex with Men and the Cultural Politics of Sexual Identity Categories
Research shows that some heterosexually identified men engage in sex with men; however, they remain largely hidden and little understood. Despite long-standing scholarly recognition that sexual identity and orientation do not always neatly coincide, the culturally normative heterosexual/homosexual binary tends to shape mainstream perceptions of such men as well as render them invisible in sexual health systems reliant on stable sexual identity ca…
The embodied relationality of blood-borne viruses: How families matter in the context of a stigmatised viral infection
The makings of a man: Social generational masculinities in Bangladesh
The emergence of specific forms of masculinity is bounded by space and time. While attention has been given to the contexts within which forms of masculinity develop, rather less is known about men’s enactment of masculinity from a social generational perspective. To address this gap, insights from Mannheim’s work on social generations, and Connell’s notions of masculinity are drawn upon to advance understanding of social generational masculiniti…
Potency and vulnerability: Troubled 'selves' in the context of antiretroviral therapy
Belonging, social connection and non‐clinical care: Experiences of HIV peer support among recently diagnosed people living with HIV in Australia
Effective HIV treatments have transformed the medical needs of people living with HIV (PLHIV) to a chronic condition. However, stigma, poorer mental health outcomes and social isolation remain significant challenges for many PLHIV. HIV peer support programs have assisted PLHIV in navigating the clinical, emotional and social aspects of living with HIV. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 recently diagnosed PLHIV in Australia to explore …
Understanding 'risk' in families living with mixed blood-borne viral infection status: The doing and undoing of 'difference
Risk' has long been at the centre of expert and popular perceptions of transmissible and stigmatised blood-borne viral infections, such as HIV and viral hepatitis. There is a substantial body of research on transmission risk among couples with mixed viral infection status (serodiscordance). But we know very little about how families affected by HIV and viral hepatitis engage with understandings of infectiousness and how these shape family relatio…
Caring Masculinities in the Context of HIV Serodiscordant Relationships in Papua New Guinea
Globally, there is limited research exploring the positive role men play in reducing HIV vulnerability or in the care and support of women living with HIV. This paper draws on interviews conducted with men and women in heterosexual HIV serodiscordant relationships as part of a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the social aspects of biomedicine among serodiscordant couples in two high HIV-burden areas in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Findings hig…
Family imaginaries in the disclosure of a blood-borne virus
Contemporary sociological work has emphasised that family is not static, but actively shaped by ideas of who and what makes family. Disclosure of an illness, including diagnosis of stigmatised infections such as HIV, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, can change the dynamics of family relationships. This paper draws on 61 qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019 with people in Australia with one or more of thes…
Vibrant Entanglements: HIV Biomedicine and Serodiscordant Couples in Papua New Guinea
The global ambition to "end AIDS" hinges on the universal uptake of HIV treatment-as-prevention and is undergirded by the assumption that biomedical technologies have consistent, predictable effects across highly diverse settings. But as anthropologists argue, such technologies are actively transformed by their local encounters, with various constitutive effects. How priority populations, such as HIV "serodiscordant" couples, negotiate treatment-…
When HIV Figures in Family Life: Exploring the Relational Reach of Serodiscordance
The New Cultural Politics of the Waiting Room: Straight Men, Gay-Friendly Clinics and ‘Inclusive’ HIV Care
HIV-Negativity in Serodiscordant Relationships: The Absence, Enactment, and Liminality of Serostatus Identity
Three decades into the HIV epidemic, one affected group remains largely invisible: HIV-negative people in intimate relationships with HIV-positive people. Their lives are entwined with the everyday realities of HIV, whether emotional, sexual, social, or medical, yet their experiences, meanings, and practices of being HIV-negative in that context are little considered and understood. When they do appear in the HIV literature, they tend to be assig…
Experience as Evidence: The Prospects for Biographical Narratives in Drug Policy
Programs and policies are increasingly framed by the logics of “evidence-based policy,” a term subject to critical scrutiny and change after it emerged as an explicit valuing of specific types of quantitative data as objective, and a devaluing of most types of qualitative data. The transfer of “evidence-based” approaches to drug policy was mobilized by a distrust of people who use drugs, and of people who work with them. This distrust remains imp…
Mapping Experiences of Serodiscordance: Using Visual Methodologies to Construct Relationality in Families Living With or Affected by Stigmatized Infectious Disease
The "my health, our family" research project was established to document stories of what serodiscordance (mixed infection status) means for Australian families affected by HIV, hepatitis B, and/or hepatitis C. A family mapping exercise was developed for the start of interviews as a way to conceptualize serodiscordance as a movement of "closeness" and "distance" within the relational networks that participants defined as "family," the outcome of w…
Breaking Binaries? Biomedicine and Serostatus Borderlands among Couples with Mixed HIV Status
With recent breakthroughs in HIV treatment and prevention, the meanings of HIV-positivity and HIV-negativity are changing at biomedical and community levels. We explore how binary constructions of HIV serostatus identities are giving way to something more complex that brings both welcome possibilities and potential concerns. We draw on research with couples with mixed HIV status to argue that, in the context of lived experiences, serostatus ident…
HIV Health in Context: Negotiating Medical Technology and Lived Experience
Biomedical constructions of health and illness as objective categories have long been challenged by social theorists. As part of this critique, an analytic distinction is made between the domains of doctors and patients to highlight differences in perspective and power. Illness narratives and phenomenological studies foreground how patient experiences and understandings of health are complex, socially embedded and often conflict with medical mode…
Incorporating Pharmakon: HIV, Medicine, and Body Shape Change
Invested with the capacity to reinstate physiological order, medicines are at the centre of contemporary health care. Their purpose and efficacy are generally seen as predictable and concrete: disease = therapy = outcome. These culturally specific understandings shape the practices and meanings of taking medicines. This article, however, queries what actually takes place when human bodies and medical drugs converge. Is it a solely therapeutic aff…
Facing HIV: Body Shape Change and the (in)Visibility of Illness
Illness is commonly invested with considerable stigma because of its tendency to evoke charged meanings around corporeality, selfhood, suffering, and mortality. Perhaps more than any contemporary disease HIV/AIDS has served as a powerful signifier for a range of cultural anxieties. Given the resultant stigma, HIV becomes very much a question of visibility. This article explores the visibility of HIV within the Sydney gay community with reference …
Potency and vulnerability: Troubled 'selves' in the context of antiretroviral therapy
We just don't know: Ambivalence about treatment strategies in the Australian community-based HIV media
The community-based HIV media in Australia provide a unique arena for the negotiation of competing models of medicine between activists, clinicians, government and people living with HIV/AIDS. This article examines how these media have interpreted developments in HIV treatment strategies since the introduction of new treatments in 1996, and identifies the discursive elements employed in journalistic constructions of the temporality and character …
Intimate immensity: Phenomenology of place and space in an Australian yoga community
This article is a dialogue between Edward Casey's theory of place and an ethnographic case study of Satyananda Yoga practice in Australia. At issue is Casey's claim that embodied being-in-the-world is irrevocably dependent on a sense of place for its own existential coherence and, conversely, that placeless space inspires terror. This claim is partly rendered problematic by the ethnographic material, which details how Satyananda yogis enact a ran…
Sero-silence and sero-sharing: Managing HIV in serodiscordant heterosexual relationships
Research shows that couples with differing HIV status can face a number of social, sexual and relationship challenges. Communication is often emphasised as the key to couples' ability to cope with these challenges. Silence by implication becomes positioned as inherently negative, even dysfunctional. The privileging of communication as proper therapeutic adjustment to illness forecloses consideration of the complexities of managing HIV as a serodi…
From closet to heterotopia: A conceptual exploration of disclosure and ‘passing’ among heterosexuals living with HIV
This paper explores how experiences of disclosure and passing among heterosexuals living with HIV in Australia can be meaningfully conceptualised beyond therapeutic discourses and habitual metaphors. It engages in a dialogue between qualitative research material, HIV disclosure literature and theory. It is first argued that an emphasis on the therapeutic value of disclosure in much of the literature obscures the complexities of HIV stigma as soci…
Making monsters: Heterosexuality, crime and race in recent Western media coverage of HIV
In the early HIV epidemic, Western media coverage encouraged the idea that infection was linked to ‘other’ identities located outside the ‘mainstream’; outside ‘proper’ heterosexuality. Today, however, HIV has become repositioned as a global heterosexual epidemic. Analyses show that since the 1990s Western media have shifted away from blame and hysteria to an increasingly routinised reporting of HIV as a health story and social justice issue. But…
"Vulnerability, gender and "proxy negativity: Women in relationships with HIV-positive men in Australia
Fear, complacency and the spectacle of risk: The making of HIV as a public concern in Australia
This article explores how HIV is constituted as a matter of public concern in Australia, where - unlike much of the rest of the world - there is a continuing low incidence of heterosexual transmission. In this context, it is timely to explore how the media contributes to the ongoing mobilization of public interest in HIV, and how heterosexual audiences are brought into focus as the imagined `publics' of mainstream debates on HIV. This article ide…
Reflections on the Swiss Consensus Statement in the context of qualitative interviews with heterosexuals living with HIV
In 2008, the Swiss Federal AIDS Commission released a statement concluding that people with HIV who are on treatment and have an undetectable viral load are non-infectious and can safely practice unprotected sex with their HIV-negative partner under certain conditions. Contradicting over 25 years of HIV prevention messages, the so called Swiss Consensus Statement sparked a polarised international debate. One key concern is that the Statement will…
Embodied worlds: A semiotic phenomenology of Satyananda Yoga
Phenomenological theories that posit embodied beings and their worlds as coextensive have significant parallels with cosmological tenets in schools of Indian yoga and tantra, including some of its Western adaptations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Satyananda Yoga community in Australia, this article explores three theories of signification to try to grasp the complex ways body-world relations are thematized, mediated, and experienced i…
Human rights and universal access for men who have sex with men and people who inject drugs: A qualitative analysis of the 2010 Ungass narrative country progress reports
HIV-Negativity in Serodiscordant Relationships: The Absence, Enactment, and Liminality of Serostatus Identity
Three decades into the HIV epidemic, one affected group remains largely invisible: HIV-negative people in intimate relationships with HIV-positive people. Their lives are entwined with the everyday realities of HIV, whether emotional, sexual, social, or medical, yet their experiences, meanings, and practices of being HIV-negative in that context are little considered and understood. When they do appear in the HIV literature, they tend to be assig…
When HIV-Positive Children Grow Up: A Critical Analysis of the Transition Literature in Developed Countries
Young people with perinatally acquired HIV are routinely problematized in the research literature as inadequately equipped to manage transition to adolescent sexuality and adult clinical care without comprehensive interventions, partly because of challenges associated with adolescence itself, and partly because of neurocognitive and psychosocial dysfunctions commonly attributed to these children. However, little is actually known about this popul…
The Undoing and Doing of Sexual Identity among Heterosexual Men with HIV in Australia
This article explores the tendency among heterosexual men with HIV in Australia to declare their sexual identity in a way that is otherwise atypical among heterosexuals. This apparent need to articulate heterosexuality tends to create a sense of discomfort within the local HIV sector, partly because it seems curiously anomalous, and partly because, on the face of it, it lends itself to a perception of homophobia. The author seeks to examine this …
The New Cultural Politics of the Waiting Room: Straight Men, Gay-Friendly Clinics and ‘Inclusive’ HIV Care
Non/infectious corporealities: Tensions in the biomedical era of 'HIV normalisation
In the contemporary HIV epidemic, antiretroviral treatments are increasingly considered so effective at viral suppression that they render people with HIV sexually non-infectious. With its radical implications for global HIV prevention, this emerging paradigm is invested with the potential to turn the epidemic around and to 'normalise' one of the most feared infectious diseases in history, thus echoing wider trends of 'biomedicalisation'. What re…
“I don't blame that guy that gave it to me”: Contested discourses of victimisation and culpability in the narratives of heterosexual women infected with HIV
In Australia, most women with HIV were infected through heterosexual sex, echoing global patterns. In media coverage, these women are typically portrayed as having been deceived by men they trusted, or as victims in criminal cases against HIV-positive men from high-prevalence countries. Heterosexuals are clearly overrepresented in such cases, a pattern consistent across high-income countries. It has been suggested that the victim/perpetrator dist…
Understanding Concerns About Treatment-as-Prevention Among People with HIV who are not Using Antiretroviral Therapy
Significant ambivalence: Perspectives of Australian HIV service providers on universal treatment-as-prevention (TasP) for serodiscordant couples
In Australia, ‘treatment-as-prevention’ (TasP) is currently being rolled out across New South Wales (NSW) as part of the state government’s new HIV strategy. Following the promising results of recent clinical trials, antiretroviral treatments have been reframed as a global HIV prevention tool and imbued with great hopes of radically reducing sexual transmissions and even ending the pandemic. Alongside broad acknowledegment of its efficacy, TasP h…
Caring for ‘underground’ kids: Qualitative interviews with clinicians about key issues for young people growing up with perinatally acquired HIV in Australia
Young people growing up with HIV are an emerging subpopulation in the global epidemic. Discursive representations of this population are largely dominated by the US-based research literature, which typically focuses on dysfunctions, sexual risks and negative public health outcomes. Against this background, our article examines clinical perspectives on key issues for young people with perinatally acquired HIV who are transitioning to adolescence a…
No Ordinary Mainstream Illness: How HIV Doctors Perceive the Virus
Research has shown that social representations of HIV can constitute barriers to health workers' willingness to provide HIV care. Considering a growing shortage in the HIV primary workforce in Western countries, we examine how HIV is perceived today by doctors involved in its care. In 1989 Sontag predicted that once the virus became better understood and treatable, the dehumanizing meanings that defined the early epidemic would vanish and HIV wou…
Bridging the HIV Divide: Stigma, Stories and Serodiscordant Sexuality in the Biomedical Age
Sociology (52 works) · Medicine (43 works) · Psychology (42 works) · HIV/AIDS Research and Interventions (38 works) · Gender Studies (30 works) · Social Psychology (30 works) · Family medicine (25 works) · Political science (24 works) · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV (23 works) · Sex work and related issues (23 works)