Cultural discourses and HIV/AIDS activists' meanings about PrEP

Since the approval of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention in 2012, research has increasingly considered how communities of men who have sex with men make sense of this prevention technology, often highlighting individual-level attitudes about PrEP. Drawing on interviews with 16 HIV activists, this study aimed to determine how activists make sense of advances in HIV prevention technology. Participants' sense-making about PrEP took the form of not merely the expression of individual attitudes, but rather reflections connected to their personal biographies and activist experience. Activists sustain seemingly contradictory discourses about PrEP, at once drawing on personal biographies and a discourse central to activist history to express scepticism about PrEP, but also other discourses to justify pharmaceutical intervention for prevention. Study findings provide evidence of the importance of attending to past and present cultural discourses when examining health advocacy groups' constructions of advances in science.