PhD project Recent global events proved once again that the media have a vital role in a health crisis: not only do they share scientific knowledge, but they also – more subtly – shape perceptions, narratives, and discourses about the disease and the people affected. This doctoral project looks back at the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic and investigates which discourses were employed by Swedish mainstream and queer media to portray the events and the people involved.
The project analyses the articles published on the HIV/AIDS epidemic by two Swedish media, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the queer magazine Revolt – mot sexuella fördomar, from 1982 to 1986. The choice of material isn’t casual: it is fundamental not only to research mainstream discourses on the epidemic, but also to give voice to how the community most associated with the disease made sense of the epidemic through its own media. The project focuses specifically on how people with HIV/AIDS and people belonging to the so-called “risk groups” were portrayed in the coverage.
The project builds on the concept of discourse, described by Michel Foucault as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”. Language is a fundamental component of discourses: the way we write and speak about things, people, and concepts informs the way we think about them. Moreover, language is tightly connected to power relations and knowledge, and should be conceptualized in a critical manner: using language is never a neutral action, as words are linked to specific representations and narratives – in short, discourses.
The project combines qualitative and quantitative analysis by employing critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The first entails an analysis of 30 articles – 15 by Dagens Nyheter and 15 by Revolt – in their entirety, to uncover meanings and discourses they convey. The second method has the goal of giving a wider picture of the discourses expressed by the entirety of the HIV/AIDS coverage by the two sources. A software is employed to investigate all the articles and uncover patterns and trends that would be impossible to notice with a solely qualitative approach.
During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the media often exacerbated the widespread stigma and discrimination towards people affected by the disease. To reflect on the media coverage of this specific epidemic means thus to reflect on how we use language, in which way, and to which means. At the same time, research has often discussed the HIV/AIDS epidemic by portraying the people affected by the disease as passive participants and faceless victims, and thus silencing the pivotal role of the queer community’s organizing and activism. To investigate how the queer community wrote about the disease, then, becomes a way to highlight the strength and courage that queer people showed during and after the epidemic.
