Hurley ME, Grierson JW, McDonald KM, Willis JM, Pitts MK; International Conference on AIDS.
Int Conf AIDS. 2002 Jul 7-12; 14: abstract no. E11614.
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia
BACKGROUND: Interventions into the health maintenance practices of HIV positive people understandably focus on clinical care. However, Australian social research indicates that cultures of care amongst HIV positive gay men also involve them in peer, policy, media and community organisational support networks, as well as clinical consultations. METHODS: The HIV Futures qualitative studies 1997-2002 (HFQ, n=119) expand understandings of mutual personal support amongst longer term HIV infected gay men and allow more recently infected gay men to access this support even as their experience of infection then shifts the ways social support is configured. HFQ builds a descriptive matrix of the changing social practices that constitute self-care. However, the interviews also reverberate with gothic imagery and a macabre sense of humour that erupts and displaces the rationalism of the interview genre. RESULTS: HFQ identifies the experience of living with HIV as marked by a gap between having health maintenance practices to draw on and ways of living that exceed these practices in the name of quality of life. Multiple aspects of treatments decisions often appear to be made within that gap, as do ways of seeing oneself in relation to the virus: 'It needs to be soothed and calmed and put to bed. Put to rest. [laughs] Euthanased. [laughs].' CONCLUSIONS: The gap is of cultural relevance to treatments education, yet it is not often taken seriously by health promotion as a positively productive survival strategy. Macabre humour and wit 'socialise' the experience of living with HIV and treatments, building bonds and maintaining cultures of resilience that recognise and 'own' terror and fear, but are not defined by them. The resulting shared cultures of diagnosis, living with HIV, morbidity and mortality can be understood as a 'therapeutics', social and pharmacological practices engaged with before a cure, and incorporated into treatments education.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
- Counseling
- Culture
- Educational Status
- HIV Infections
- HIV Seropositivity
- Homosexuality
- Homosexuality, Male
- Humans
- Male
- Perception
- Social Support
- education
- therapy
Other ID:
UI: 102256083
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