Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Within dominant research and practice, HIV is commonly positioned as the categorical outcome of a risk-laden life trajectory: one is positive, negative, or has an unknown status. “Test and treat” drive mainstream prevention and interventions in the U.S. (ONAP, 2015). This approach, however, does little to address HIV as an historically traumatic event and chronically stressful experience for queer men. This project deployed a discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003, 2013; Gee, 2014; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) to explore the process of HIV stress exchange (HSE), as I term it, which is a purposefully triangulated conversation amongst HIV discourse, intergenerational stress, and queer men. Initial findings will be reviewed; data selection completes summer 2017, and is comprised of in-depth interviews and an original archive of visual resources. In this moment, queer men hold anxieties related to non-validated, unintelligible, and often unvoiced stress specifically due to living within the era of HIV, inclusive of all ages and sero-statuses. Tending to HIV as discourse exchanged across generations is an important addition to the array of prevention strategies and interventions. This work can illuminate the effects of HIV as a principally traumatic event, and how queer men negotiate this stress and their wellbeing.