Mediated Urgency: Exploring GBTQ+ Perceptions of Antibiotic-Resistant Sexually Transmitted Infections

Often, research takes place once a health issue is already at 'crisis' point. However, health professionals and populations can have different understandings of 'urgency'. At present, health authorities, scientists and other medical professionals are increasingly concerned about escalating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the context of STIs. Clinicians worry about Neisseria gonorrhoeae becoming progressively resistant to last-line treatment, as well as the very limited treatment options for resistant Mycoplasma genitalium. This paper explores how states of 'urgency' and 'crisis' are socially produced within people's everyday contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 49 gay and bisexual cisgender men and trans and gender diverse people, we explore contemporary GBTQ+ (gay, bisexual, trans and queer+) understandings of antibiotic-resistant STIs and people's perceptions of urgency. Findings reveal that urgency is shaped by pre-existing understandings of resistance, spatial-temporal dimensions, histories and experiences of pleasure. We conceptualise this as a relation of mediated urgency, which centres the multidimensional production and reception of crisis rather than making a priori assumptions that 'crisis' has already arrived. This theoretically and empirically recentres the everyday, relational and contextualised manifestations of how people relate to 'crisis', critical to working with communities to address it/them.