Pozitively Me: HIV Support Groups, Culture and Individualism in Toronto

ABSTRACT

In Toronto, numerous support groups exist for people living with HIV (PLWH). Membership is based on HIV status and sometimes an additional demographic factor of ethnicity, age, sexuality or gender. Groups cover a range of topics including physical and psycho-social health, and everyday challenges of living with HIV. Based on participant observation in three support groups, this article examines how individualism and cultural difference structure ‘positive living’ therapeutic frameworks, and how the prioritization of the former over the latter contributes to the production of a depoliticized, neoliberal formation of multicultural therapeutic citizenship with differing effects for differentially positioned PLWH.

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KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• HIV/AIDS
• individualism
• multiculturalism
• support groups

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the staff, volunteers and clients of the Toronto HIV/AIDS service organizations and support groups that I worked with for their support and feedback. I would also like to thank Alison Crosby and Julia Pyryeskina, the Director and Coordinator of the Centre For Feminist Research at York University, Toronto, for their ongoing administrative support. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Lenore Manderson, Dr. Victoria Team, the anonymous reviewers and staff of Medical Anthropology for their close readings and insightful critiques of earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. I was not told what length of time constituted ‘newly diagnosed.” Members of all three groups appeared to have known their status for at least five years – in Group B, there were a number of members who had been HIV positive for over 25 years. The HASO sponsoring groups A&C had a separate support group for newly diagnosed clients.

2. These identifications reflect what many would argue is the dominant perspective of HIV in Toronto HASOs, that is, the HIV response in Toronto has, until recently, been organized primarily by and for the gay white middle class male population. However, my experiences in volunteering at a Toronto HASO as a front-desk receptionist and working with sexual orientation and gender identity refugees in Toronto, a number of whom were HIV+, provided insights into the ways in which an HIV positive status intersects with other racial, migration, economic and political statuses that impact one’s experience of living with the virus (Murray 2016).

3. This project received approval from my university ethics review committee.

4. See Hastings (2019:286–287) for a discussion on how a support group facilitators organize discussions around disclosure of HIV status in the context of ongoing criminalization of HIV in Canada.

5. These percentages reflect infection rates for the Province of Ontario. While I could not find similar statistics for the city of Toronto (the largest city in Ontario), the majority of HIV+ Ontarians reside in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), so these numbers may be approximately accurate for the GTA.

6. There are currently over 31 000 people living with HIV in the province of Ontario, the majority of whom reside in the Greater Toronto Area (https://www.ohtn.on.ca/research-portals/priority-populations/people-living-with-hiv/, accessed September 20, 2019). The rate of new HIV diagnoses in Ontario continues to be highest in Toronto (15.0/100 000) (Wilton et al. 2017).

7. There are approximately eight additional HASOs in Toronto devoted to providing services for specific ethno-racial, women’s and/or linguistic populations i.e. African-Canadian, South Asian, South-East Asian, Latinx, and/or French-speaking. There is significant variation in the size and scale of these organizations in terms of funding, staffing and programming.

8. Additional support groups may be found in some of the smaller Toronto HASOs (see note 7 above). I did not conduct research with these organizations, so I am not familiar with the exact numbers, organization and content of their support groups.

9. For more on the ethics and politics of secrecy and disclosure of HIV status in different socio-cultural contexts, see (Benton 2015:61–99; Manderson et al. 2015; Rhine 2016; Smith 2014:156–157; Squire 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

David A. B. Murray

David A. B. Murray is Professor of Anthropology and Sexuality Studies at York University, Toronto. His most recent book is Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus (2016).