HIV-Negativity in Serodiscordant Relationships: The Absence, Enactment, and Liminality of Serostatus Identity

Abstract

Three decades into the HIV epidemic, one affected group remains largely invisible: HIV-negative people in intimate relationships with HIV-positive people. Their lives are entwined with the everyday realities of HIV, whether emotional, sexual, social, or medical, yet their experiences, meanings, and practices of being HIV-negative in that context are little considered and understood. When they do appear in the HIV literature, they tend to be assigned an identity that is preconceived as inherently different from and in tension with HIV-positivity. Using anthropological theory, research literature, and qualitative interviews with HIV-negative partners in Australia, I challenge this idea by exploring the social absence, enactments, and liminality of HIV-negative identity in serodiscordant relationships.

Key Words:

• enactment
• HIV-negativity
• liminality
• serodiscordant couples
• serostatus identity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research study on which this article is based was funded in part by the Commonwealth Department of Health & Ageing and by NSW Health. I would like to thank Dr. Jeanne Ellard and Dean Murphy for our lively and insightful discussions about serodiscordance. The conceptual framing of this article owes much to those discussions. I also thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Asha Persson

ASHA PERSSON is a social anthropologist by training and a research fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Over the past 10 years, she has conducted several qualitative research projects on various cultural and lived aspects of HIV, including the first Australian study specifically exploring the experiences of heterosexuals living with HIV and serodiscordant heterosexual couples.