Risking Disclosure: Unruly Rhetorics and Queer(ing) HIV Risk Communication on Grindr

ABSTRACT

Using narrative-based user experience methods, this article investigates how youth living with HIV discuss their serostatus on the dating app Grindr. This study found that participants resisted Grindr’s interface, which encourages users to disclose their HIV status. Using intersectional queer theories of unruliness, this article argues that these resistant user experiences destabilize the underlying ideological aims of Grindr’s risk-reduction strategies, revealing ulterior practices of risk and safety stemming from the embodied realities of living with HIV.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer theory
• HIV
• critical theory
• health/medical communication
• risk communication
• user experience

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editors of the special issue, who offered multiple rounds of feedback and made a number of caring and helpful editorial decisions that facilitated writing this article during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you, in particular, to Dr. Laura Gonzales, for reading an early draft of this article and offering encouragement and direction when I desperately needed it. This article was supported by two research fellowships from the University of Minnesota: the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Fellowship from the Department of Writing Studies and the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School. Thank you, especially, to members of my PhD committee—Dr. Pat Bruch, Dr. Tom Reynolds, Dr. Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch—for helping me secure those fellowships and encouraging me to pursue this research project. Most importantly, this article would have been impossible without the youth living with HIV who shared their stories and without the support from the HIV and Youth Project. Thank you for all of your support and inspiration, and everything I learned about HIV I learned from you.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. PrEP, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, is a drug regimen for people who are HIV negative. PrEP adherence reduces the risk of contracting HIV by up to 99%. Undetectable equals Untransmittable (U=U) recognizes that people living with an undetectable HIV viral load pose no risk of transmitting the virus to others.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

McKinley Green

McKinley Green (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, where he teaches classes in rhetoric and professional and technical writing. His interests are located at intersections of technology, cultural rhetorics, and theories of social justice.