PhD project Recent global events proved once again that the media have a vital role in a health crisis: not only do they share scientific knowledge, but they also – more subtly – shape perceptions, narratives, and discourses about the disease and the people affected. This doctoral project looks back at the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic and investigates which discourses were employed by Swedish mainstream and gay media to portray the events and the people involved.
The project analyses articles on the HIV/AIDS epidemic published from 1982 to 1986 by two Swedish media, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the gay magazine Revolt – mot sexuella fördomar. Specifically, the focus is on discursive representations of gay and bisexual men and on how language can be a productive and creative tool to both marginalise and create a sense of belonging.
The project builds on the concept of discourse, described by Michel Foucault as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”. Language is a fundamental component of discourses: the way we write and speak about things, people, and concepts informs the way we think about them. Moreover, language is tightly connected to power relations and knowledge, and should be conceptualised critically: using language is never a neutral action, as words are linked to specific representations and narratives – in short, discourses.
The project combines qualitative and quantitative analysis by employing critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The first entails an in-depth analysis of 30 articles – 15 by Dagens Nyheter and 15 by Revolt – to identify language patterns and reflect on their meaning. The second method aims to provide a broader picture of the discourses expressed across the entirety of the two sources' HIV/AIDS coverage. Corpus software is employed to investigate all the articles and uncover patterns and trends that would be hard to notice by employing only a qualitative approach. As such, the analysis can be defined as a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis.
During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, public discourses often exacerbated the widespread stigma and discrimination towards people affected by the disease. To reflect on the media coverage of this specific epidemic means thus to reflect on how we use language, in which way, and to what means. Research on HIV/AIDS media representation has often bypassed the pivotal role of the queer community’s organising and activism. To employ Revolt as one of my sources, and as such, to investigate how it wrote about the disease, then, becomes a way to highlight the strength, courage, and proactivity that the community showed in the context of the epidemic.
