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Condom, homoeroticism and discourses on HIV/AIDS prevention

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Author(s):
Thiago Félix Pinheiro
Total Authors: 1
Document type: Doctoral Thesis
Press: São Paulo.
Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Medicina (FM/SBD)
Defense date:
Examining board members:
Jose Ricardo de Carvalho Mesquita Ayres; Regina Maria Barbosa; Ivan França Junior; Vera Silvia Facciolla Paiva
Advisor: Jose Ricardo de Carvalho Mesquita Ayres; Georgia Sibele Nogueira da Silva
Abstract

The initial proposal for the use of condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS is linked to the concept of safe sex, developed by the gay community in the United States in the early 1980s. In Brazil, safe sex was incorporated in the early responses to the epidemic and, with the development of preventive actions, condom promotion was adopted as the main strategy to protect against HIV sexual transmission. Nowadays, the population segment composed of gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) represents one of the focuses of the epidemic concentration and therefore one of the key populations for targeting prevention. This work aims to recover the discourses on the use of condoms as an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy directed to gay/MSM population, built by both Brazilian public health policy and social movements, seeking to understand their meaning in the context of the impasses faced by prevention throughout his history. This study is based on constructionist frameworks of sexuality and uses as references the vulnerability perspective and the theory of sexual scripts. This is a qualitative research, carried out based on in-depth interviews with 13 people who keep/kept significant roles in fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country and/or in the reflecting on issues related to prevention, especially in the scope of gay/MSM sexual scenarios. The selected participants are prominent actors in the work related to the promotion of condom use: driving public policy, producing research and acting in LGBT and AIDS social movements. From the collected narratives and associated references, a historical recovery of the trajectory of the condom as an HIV/AIDS prevention is presented. The analysis points out that the convergence of preventive discourses on recommendation of the condom slipped on the technicism, characteristic of the process of social medicalization. The technicist use of the prevention consisted of (a) a prescriptive approach, expressed in the forward playback of the message \"use condom\"; (b) the decontextualization of preventive discourses in relation to sexual content inherent in the use of condoms, especially contested in proposals of eroticizing this device; (c) the impositive posture of professionals and prevention campaigns. Additionally, prevention has bogged down in difficulties on the approach of homoeroticism due to the strengthening of moralist and conservative resistances in Brazilian policy. This scenario, which undermines the rights of gay/MSM to health, is exacerbated by a crisis in the structure of AIDS programs and organizations of social movements. Thus, the progress in confronting the epidemic and, more specifically, in the reduction of infection rates in gay/MSM depend on overcoming these barriers which tend to be reproduced in the approach to the new HIV/AIDS prevention technologies (AU)