Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 15:15 - 16:45
PAPER SESSION 8
community as the basis for health promotion and the emergence of collective, digitally-organised HIV testing, and; the
importance of technologies for the social capital of people facing elevated risk for sexually transmitted infections. Key
themes of this panel will include how individuals, couples, networks and collectivities negotiate changing expectations
regarding the role of digital and medical technologies in sexual intimacy, relational possibilities, and elective
community, among other matters. The panel therefore addresses transition in one key domain of public policy
articulated into intimate lifeworlds, revealing how technologies of sexual health are addressed, appropriated,
reinvented and resisted by its subjects.
The panel is linked with another which addresses new narrative technologies of intimacy in relation to gender,
sexuality and parenting.
Intimate Technologies and Reflexive Sexual Health: Self-risk Assessment and Self-testing
Flowers, P., Ahmed, B., Park, C., Young, I., Frankis, J., Davis, M.
(Glasgow Caledonian University)
Innovations in sexual health are rapidly transforming the location, implementation and meaning of testing for many
groups of people including men who have sex with men. Key innovations include the use of social media to assess
risk, and the use of self-test (or ‘home test’ kits) to receive diagnoses, seek treatment and access support and
potentially partner notification.
This paper analyses the narratives of key stake-holders involved in the network of implementation of such innovations
(n=45). It analyses data from focus group and one to one discussions with gay men (and other men who have sex
with men), community organisations and community leaders and a range of NHS and government staff.
Findings stress deep uncertainties with regard to engaging with such technological innovations, they highlight the
fraught balance of both the opportunities and constraints to construct a new public health. Therein new subjectivities,
risks and uncertainties proliferate and the relationships between public and private are contorted though the radical
partial privatisation of intimate health care.
Negotiating ‘New’ HIV Technologies, Intimacy and Condoms: Exploring Gay and Bisexual Men’s Responses
to Prep and Tasp in Scotland
Young, I., Flowers, P., McDaid, L.
(University of Glasgow)
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and Treatment as Prevention (TasP) - both of which harness the preventative effects
of HIV treatment (ARVs) - have emerged as major new HIV prevention technologies. While PrEP and TasP reflect
significant clinical discoveries, there has been limited and uneven exploration of if and how these technologies might
be integrated into existing sexual risk management practices. We conducted qualitative research in Scotland with
communities most affected by HIV to better understand the implications of PrEP and TasP. Our presentation draws on
five focus groups and 20 in-depth interviews with gay and bisexual men and explores how participants imagined these
new HIV prevention technologies in the context of existing sexual practices, and in particular relation to condoms.
While the condom has often been described as a barrier to intimacy, it emerged as a critical component of PrEP and
TasP. Participants reacted strongly to PrEP and the notion that an ‘imagined’ community of gay and bisexual men
might abandon years of condom-based safer sex practices since condoms reflected not only a physical barrier to HIV,
but a shared practice of care for others. For those men living with HIV and within the context of TasP, the condom
formed a critical element in not only their risk reduction strategies, but in the formation and/or maintenance of intimacy
with sexual partners. Our findings suggest that ‘new’ HIV technologies may allow gay and bisexual men to renegotiate
the role of condoms and forms of intimacy in their sexual practice.
‘Personal Communities’, ‘Hidden Solidarities’, and HIV Testing Technologies
Boydell, N., McDaid, L.M., Buston, K.
(University of Glasgow)
Collective responses to HIV have been important to the establishment of safer sex practices and successful HIV
prevention among gay men. However, some have noted the changing role of gay communities in HIV prevention,
where a ‘loss of community’ may have implications for future HIV prevention (Davis, 2008). This paper explores the
‘hidden solidarities’ articulated by young gay and bisexual men through their accounts of their personal, social
relationships with friends within their ‘personal communities’ (Holt, 2011; Spencer & Pahl, 2006). Based on analysis of
data drawn from interviews with 30 gay and bisexual men, aged 18-29 years and living in various regions of Scotland,
I explore the ways in which affective ties between the young men and their friends, and shared understandings of
sexual risk, shape and inform their responses to both the concept, and practice, of ‘safer sex’. By extending
BSA Annual Conference 2015 296
Glasgow Caledonian University