A Long-term Condition: HIV’s Normalisation

Abstract

In early 2013, I visit a UK HIV organisation, some of whose service users have participated in my research, to give some feedback about what all 47 interviewees in my study of HIV support narratives have said. As is usually the case, the workers and volunteers, most of them living with HIV themselves, already know almost everything I tell them. Again as often happens, their apparently ‘local’ knowledge, accreted from numerous stories of practice in a specific city, turns out to have greater transferability than it is generally given credit for. At the end of the discussion, I mention how many interviewees positioned themselves ambiguously in relation to HIV. Interviewees narrated themselves both as citizens like all others, for whom HIV is just one aspect of their lives, and as people in whose lives certain three-letter acronyms are powerful, and must never be lost sight of. Once more, this ambiguity around HIV’s normalisation is something that the group knows about very well. One member says that the organisation faces the issue all the time, especially with newly-diagnosed people. He wants to tell them the encouraging story of HIV’s good medical management and the normal, happy lives that HIV positive people can live. At the same time, he knows that this is not how living with HIV always works out. So he must position his redemptive narratives (McAdams 2006) strategically, against all too common experiences of highly de-naturalising illness, as well stigma, discrimination, exclusion and isolation.