Surveillance, stigma & sociotechnical design for HIV

Abstract

Online dating and hookup platforms have fundamentally changed people’s day-to-day practices of sex and love — but exist in tension with older social and medicolegal norms. This is particularly the case for people with HIV, who are frequently stigmatized, surveilled, ostracized, and incarcerated because of their status. Efforts to make intimate platforms “work” for HIV frequently focus on user-to-user interactions and disclosure of one’s HIV status but elide both the structural forces at work in regulating sex and the involvement of the state in queer lives. In an effort to foreground these forces and this involvement, we analyze the approaches that intimate platforms have taken in designing for HIV disclosure through a content analysis of 50 current platforms. We argue that the implicit reinforcement of stereotypes about who HIV is or is not a concern for, along with the failure to consider state practices when designing for data disclosure, opens up serious risks for HIV-positive and otherwise marginalized people. While we have no panacea for the tension between disclosure and risk, we point to bottom-up, communal, and queer approaches to design as a way of potentially making that tension easier to safely navigate.

On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times

“…These memes beg the question, what would a COVID model made by Alice and the Tracys look like? Models Like to Watch Amongst other fields, critical HIV studies has thoroughly modeled how crisis conditions beget violent transformations in everyday forms of surveillance (Liang, Hutson, and Keyes 2020;McClelland 2019). For example, Stephen Molldrem (2020) shows how in the name of HIV prevention (a presumed social good), we have witnessed the creation and maintenance of surveillant viral load and CD4 Tcell count databases by public health authorities in the US that do not obtain consent from their subjects, engender data creep across contexts, and enact viral hierarchies.…”

Design as sexual practice: The visual culture of social apps and HIV risk in Taiwan

“…In the past decade, a growing body of research has expanded our understandings of social apps’ capacities to shape social space, health, and sexuality (Garcia et al, 2012; Miles, 2018; Muessig et al, 2013; Papacharissi, 2018; Race, 2015, 2018; Tso et al, 2016). Although there has been critical discussion about how app design is used to commodify gay sex in the name of promoting gay lifestyles (Goldberg, 2020; Race, 2018), a consideration often overlooked is the visuality of design and its mediating effects on gay men’s sociosexual practices (Some efforts that have considered this topic include: Albury et al, 2017; Liang et al, 2020; Mowlabocus, 2016; Race, 2010, 2018; Wu and Ward, 2018).…”