PrEP in the press

Abstract

This research reports on newspaper representations of PrEP, a HIV-prevention drug recently made available on a trial basis to at-risk individuals in England. Using corpus-assisted queer critical discourse analysis, we investigate the linguistic representations of the users of PrEP within three leading British newspapers from across the political spectrum between 2014–18. We find that users of PrEP are most frequently positioned as ‘men who have sex with men’ or ‘gay men’, a representation that we argue limits public awareness of HIV itself, and of available HIV prevention. Furthermore, while the most left-leaning newspaper in our corpus focuses on the human benefit of PrEP, the most right-leaning newspaper takes a moralistic stance which frames gay men as risk-taking and therefore less deserving of healthcare funding than other groups. We therefore argue that certain representations of PrEP’s beneficiaries are implicitly homophobic, and that most representations are unhelpfully restrictive.

The Public Debates Regarding the Use of the Contraceptive Pill and PrEP: What can the Arguments Used Tell Us About Attitudes Surrounding Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Norway?

“…(Holtet, 2019). The quote above has strong similarities to similar arguments made both in the U.S and in England concerning PrEP being labeled a 'promiscuity pill' or a party pill (Jones & Collins, 2020;Young et al, 2020). Moreover, such arguments echo arguments made against the Pill in the 1960s and how the Pill was seen as a harbinger of moral decay.…”

“…As in many other countries (Collins, 2021;Jones & Collins, 2020;Mowlabocus, 2020;M. Nagington & T. Sandset, 2020;Young, Boydell, Patterson, Hilton, & McDaid, 2020), the introduction of PrEP in Norway triggered a debate surrounding PrEP which thematically is both similar to the debates in other countries, but also uncannily enough, similar to the debates surrounding the launch of the pill in Norway some 50 years earlier.…”