AIDSImpact.com:: - Santa Fe, USA 2011

Abstract #310 - Risk in serodiscordant couples – Culture and context
Authors: Presenting Author: Dr Asha Persson - University of New South Wales
Additional Authors:
Aim: Serodiscordant relationships exist wherever the HIV epidemic exists and are increasingly recognised as a key context for the transmission of HIV in many parts of the world. In this presentation I argue that, to understand why serodiscordant couples engage in sexual practices that increase the chance of transmission, we need to resist the idea of “risk” as an objective and universal concept that can be readily applied across a diversity of cultures and contexts. It is an idea that rests on the assumption that HIV figures in predictable ways in serodiscordant couples: that members of such couples always perceive and experience their respective serostatuses as inherently “different” from one another and that they recognise this difference as posing a particular kind of “risk”. On this basis, couples become defined and measured largely in terms of their capacity to negotiate this risk. However, this assumption predetermines serodiscordance and obscures its potentially diverse meanings and local complexities. I draw on some of the research in this field to make the case that serodiscordance, like risk, is not a uniform category, but rather takes on multiple shapes as it is brought into being by different practices, relationship priorities, and cultural dynamics of illness, gender and sexuality. I conclude that, it is within these lived contexts that perceptions and negotiations of “risk” in couples need to be situated and understood.
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