AIDSImpact.com:: - Santa Fe, USA 2011

Abstract #332 - Putting queer in its place: The spatialization of HIV through a social marketing campaign
Authors: Presenting Author: Dr. Tyler Arguello - State of California
Additional Authors:
Aim: The current study moves to shore up the “social distance” between HIV professionals and the objects they study through a first and original study of HIV in place. This project is concerned with how the virus is spatialized, or made matter of public knowledge through location in everyday real world contexts, and how through this placement, contemporary queer male identity is also given meaning.
Method / Issue: Employing interdisciplinary qualitative methods based in critical language and visual studies, this paper provides a geosemiotic analysis of an HIV prevention social marketing effort called the “Little Prick” campaign, conducted in Seattle, Washington, over Summer 2008. The data is derived from an original theoretical and purposive dataset of in-situ photography and observations, ethnographic interviews with campaign producers, and professional development documents.
Results / Comments: In Little Prick, space was perceived through case findings of HIV infected persons, information provided by a sample gay men, and the expertise of professionals. The marketing tactics deployed were conceived through formative research, creative design practices, and an integrated media promotional plan. However, contesting these best practices, the campaign “lived” in space through contraindicative notions of where HIV risk behaviors exist, the complex workings of sexual citizenship, and through the process of branding HIV and testing.
Discussion: This study contributes to both research and communities as it is a first investigation into how and where social marketing materials exist in the world – disturbing the often common sense notion of a linear relationship between sender-message-receiver. What this analysis foregrounds for practitioners is that the relationship among queer, HIV, and prevention is discursive. The idea that “prevention fatigue” in high-risk populations hampers professional efforts may, in fact, be a “semiotic fatigue” or a sheer exhaustion of the semiotics from the controlling desires of professionals trying to conduct health promotion. Social marketing efforts hold much persuasive power, and the tactic of a cultural palette is discussed as one way to make prevention more responsive with the pace an place of the virus.
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