Histórias posit(HIV)as de gays e pessoas trans: dos estigmas à cidadania

Abstract

Based on the biomedical-mediatic discursive articulation due to the unknown etiological factors of HIV and its pathophysiology being strictly identified as the responsibility of homosexuals, trans people, foreigners, immigrants and tourists, especially Africans and Haitians, and injecting drug users in the beginning of the big AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, there have been some initial developments that have stigmatized certain populations. Are the times other? Decades of silence, myths of overcoming the epidemic and a reaction of the reactionary sectors to the increase of social policies prompts the continuation of prejudice and extermination policies that concern the whole conservative social structure. Therefore, the present research aims to understand the production of meanings about HIV / AIDS in the lives histories of HIV-positive gay, transvestites and transsexuals in Natal / RN. It is a qualitative research articulated to the biographical hermeneutics because it works more concretely with the narratives of life stories, besides being guided by the perspective of social constructionism in which it focuses especially on illustrating the processes by which people deal with the world around them, including themselves, being particularly interested in discursive practices, languages and social interactions. In this way, it was possible not only to distinguish, in the act of counting the participants, what would be of the order of the collective and what would be of the order of the individual, but to give themselves the means of apprehending and understanding the singular spaces-times each one of them forms the conjugation of their seropositive experience (and the historicity of their experience), of the life-worlds, of the common worlds of thinking and acting that participate through a social, historical and politically localized gaze. Throughout the work, some clashes with (re)produced HIV truth regimes have been outlined not in an attempt to establish other regimes but in order to add forces to other intelligibilities and realities since the construction of better responses to disease is an endless, urgent and necessary task. Surely there is still a long way to go!