Abstract
Community responses to PrEP diverge. For some communities PrEP offers a ‘revolution’ in HIV prevention, for others—including some people who use drugs—PrEP is complicated by on-going struggles for health and rights. This chapter explores these diverging responses of revolution and struggle to PrEP, particularly relating to people who use drugs. Exploring these differences is essential to appropriately tailor HIV prevention strategies. Building on analysis of community engagement in the early HIV epidemic response as well as recent stigma scholarship, the chapter develops a framework to explain how PrEP is bound up in ‘stigma struggles’: long-running processes of resistance to stigma. The character of these ‘stigma struggles’ shapes the potential for PrEP to be experienced as either revolution or struggle. The institutions and norms of biomedical science exacerbate and complicate these stigma struggles, through their symbolic power to erase history from analysis. The chapter concludes with reflections on how an analysis of stigma struggles and their role in biomedical progress can inform relevant and tailored HIV prevention strategies.
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Guise, A. (2021). The Stigma Struggles of Biomedical Progress: Understanding Community Engagement with PrEP by People Who Use Drugs. In: Bernays, S., Bourne, A., Kippax, S., Aggleton, P., Parker, R. (eds) Remaking HIV Prevention in the 21st Century. Social Aspects of HIV, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69819-5_13
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