(Where) do queer women belong? Theorizing intersectional and compulsory heterosexism in HIV research

Abstract

Queer women have been elided from HIV discourse, in part due to heterosexist constructions of HIV transmission risk categories that omit women’s sexual orientation. In this paper, I reflect on presenting at two international HIV research conferences on queer women and their erasure from HIV discourse. I employ critical discourse analysis to conference interactions to investigate how my personal experiences as a queer woman presenting at these HIV conferences mirrored queer women’s marginalization in HIV research. Reactions to my presentations focused on dominant biomedical and neoliberal discourses that neglect social and structural drivers of the epidemic. These interactions also highlighted intersectional and compulsory heterosexism where the context, topics, and structures of discourse were called into question in ways that (re)produced queer women’s invisibility and institutional, social, and material exclusion. This paper calls for HIV researchers to integrate analyses of women’s complex sexualities and reconsider the purpose of knowledge production.

Keywords:

• HIV/AIDS
• lesbian
• sexuality
• heterosexism
• queer

Acknowledgements

C. Logie would like to acknowledge funding support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). C. Logie would like to thank Peter A. Newman (Professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto), Adrian Guta (Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of English Language & Literature, Carleton University) and Margaret Gibson (PhD Candidate, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto) for valuable feedback and thoughtful comments during article preparation. The author would also like to thank the Editor, Judith Green and Associate Editor, Kirsten Bell, of Critical Public Health, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback that greatly strengthened the manuscript.

Funding

Funder: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention. Grant information: Research Seed Funds; Fund: [grant number 487453], Fund Center (CFC): [grant number 212824].

Notes

1. I use queer, lesbian, bisexual, and ‘women who have sex with women’ interchangeably to represent same-sex attracted, sexually diverse, non-heterosexual identities, practices and relationships women claim across diverse contexts, acknowledging these terms may be limited and non-representative of all of women’s terminologies and conceptualizations.