Understanding Resistances to HIV/Aids Awareness Campaigns

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: Although well informed about HIV/AIDS through prevention campaigns, people continue adopting “risk behaviors” - according to health experts. This work contributes to the debate about the reasons why there is resistance to such campaigns’ discourses, aiming to improve them. Our theoretical dialogues undergo issues of biopower and biopolitics (Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben) and the relationship between power and resistance in the setting of historical processes of subjectivation. Our assumption is that individuals in society are not just target audience of these campaigns, neither mere recipients of a specialized communication, as advertising agencies usually think. They rather constitute themselves as subjects of discourse, not always coincident with respect to the ideal (constructed by the specialized and institutionalized knowledge) of what "should be" done to prevent HIV infection. In other words, people’s thoughts on HIV/AIDS do not only consist of the campaigns’ normative discourses - other discourses, even if not institutionalized, sometimes hushed in the private sphere, serve them as sources of meaning with which they elaborate their opinions and adopt their discursive positions. We had three hypothesis: 1) there are discourses about Aids, health and HIV which are not understood by the advertising agencies and need to be identified if we want to improve the communicability with the campaigns’ target audience; 2) the processes of identification with these campaigns and with the "infected" condition (in the case of seropositives) are complex and transcend social stratifications (by age, socioeconomic status, gender), which are common to traditional elaborations of advertising agencies; 3) it is not possible to understand campaigns outside the biopolitics context, and that they also will arouse resistance.

Methods:  We analyzed prevention campaigns developed by Brazilian civil society organizations because they have been a great contribution to the national response against HIV/AIDS. We also collected, through individual interviews, and analyzed the opinions of seropositives, because this group has already been resistant to the campaigns’ messages once and now their lives are at higher risk when they do not follow the self-care recommendations, due to re-infection risk. Understanding the discourses that punctuate the resistance of this group helps us easily understand the resistance of other individuals. The methodology used was the discourse analysis according to the French-Brazilian strand (Michel Pêcheux and Eni Orlandi). We mapped the discourses present in campaigns and those present in the seropositives’ opinions and, when we contrasted them, we identified the sense dissonance that leads individuals to resist to the campaigns.

Results:  We confirmed our study hypothesis and identified the resistant discourses.

Conclusions: 

Understanding the quotidian discourses significantly contributes to communication improvements in prevention campaigns, that, in most cases, ignore the motivations by which people resist or do not identify themselves with what "could" or "should be done" to avoid the HIV (re) infection.

Implications for research and/or practice: Discourse analysis is a good method for the identification and understanding of resistances to public health campaigns. Based on our results, better HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns can be designed in Brazil, improving its relationships and dialogue with those who are already infected or with the general population.