Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in Journal of Language and Sexuality, Volume 9, Issue 2, 2020, pages: 202-225, © 2020 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - PrEP in the Press
T2 - A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of how users of HIV-prevention treatment are represented in British newspapers
AU - Jones, Lucy
AU - Collins, Luke
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in Journal of Language and Sexuality, Volume 9, Issue 2, 2020, pages: 202-225, © 2020 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2020/9/10
Y1 - 2020/9/10
N2 - This research reports on newspaper representations of PrEP, a HIV-prevention drug recently made available on a trial basis to at-risk individuals in England. Using corpus-assisted queer critical discourse analysis, we investigate the linguistic representations of the users of PrEP within three leading British newspapers from across the political spectrum between 2014-2018. We find that users of PrEP are most frequently positioned as 'men who have sex with men' or 'gay men', a representation that we argue limits public awareness of HIV itself, and of available HIV prevention. Furthermore, while the most left-leaning newspaper in our corpus focuses on the human benefit of PrEP, the most right-leaning newspaper takes a moralistic stance which frames gay men as risk-taking and therefore less deserving of healthcare funding than other groups. We therefore argue that certain representations of PrEP's beneficiaries are implicitly homophobic, and that most representations are unhelpfully restrictive.
AB - This research reports on newspaper representations of PrEP, a HIV-prevention drug recently made available on a trial basis to at-risk individuals in England. Using corpus-assisted queer critical discourse analysis, we investigate the linguistic representations of the users of PrEP within three leading British newspapers from across the political spectrum between 2014-2018. We find that users of PrEP are most frequently positioned as 'men who have sex with men' or 'gay men', a representation that we argue limits public awareness of HIV itself, and of available HIV prevention. Furthermore, while the most left-leaning newspaper in our corpus focuses on the human benefit of PrEP, the most right-leaning newspaper takes a moralistic stance which frames gay men as risk-taking and therefore less deserving of healthcare funding than other groups. We therefore argue that certain representations of PrEP's beneficiaries are implicitly homophobic, and that most representations are unhelpfully restrictive.
KW - PrEP
KW - HIV
KW - corpus linguistics
KW - queer critical discourse analysis
KW - homophobia
U2 - 10.1075/jls.20002.jon
DO - 10.1075/jls.20002.jon
M3 - Journal article
VL - 9
SP - 202
EP - 225
JO - Journal of Language and Sexuality
JF - Journal of Language and Sexuality
SN - 2211-3770
IS - 2
M1 - 2
ER -