This research reports on newspaper representations of PrEP, a HIV-prevention drug recently made available on a trial basis
to at-risk individuals in England. Using corpus-assisted queer critical discourse analysis, we investigate the linguistic representations of
the users of PrEP within three leading British newspapers from across the political spectrum between 2014–18. We find that users of PrEP are
most frequently positioned as ‘men who have sex with men’ or ‘gay men’, a representation that we argue limits public awareness of HIV
itself, and of available HIV prevention. Furthermore, while the most left-leaning newspaper in our corpus focuses on the human benefit of
PrEP, the most right-leaning newspaper takes a moralistic stance which frames gay men as risk-taking and therefore less deserving of
healthcare funding than other groups. We therefore argue that certain representations of PrEP’s beneficiaries are implicitly homophobic, and
that most representations are unhelpfully restrictive.
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2011Critical discourse analysis. In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Teun A. van Dijk (ed), 357–378. London: Sage.
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2013“It’s a hijra!” Queer linguistics revisited. Discourse and Society 24(5): 634–642.
Jaspal, Rusi & Nerlich, Brigitte
2017Polarised press reporting about HIV prevention: Social representations of pre-exposure prophylaxis in the UK press. Health 21(5): 478–497.
Jones, Lucy & Mills, Sara
2014Analysing agency: Reader responses to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Gender and Language 8(2): 225–244.
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2002Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage.
2015‘Queer linguistics as critical discourse analysis’. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin (eds), 661–680. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lovelock, Michael
2018Sex, death and austerity: Resurgent homophobia in the British tabloid press. Critical Studies in Media Communication 35(3): 225–239.
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2016Pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent the acquisition of HIV-1 infection (PROUD): Effectiveness results from the pilot phase of a pragmatic open-label randomised trial. Lancet 3871: 53–60.
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2016Propagation of information about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention through Twitter. Health Communication 31(8): 998–1007.
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2019Discursive shifts associated with coming out: A corpus-based analysis of news reports about Ricky Martin. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23(3): 284–302.
Mowlabocus, Sharif
2019‘What a skewed sense of values’: Discussing PreP in the British press. Sexualities. Online first, available at:
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Public Health England
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Public Health England
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2024. A decade of PrEP: the evolution of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis content and sentiments in South African print news media, 2012–2021. Culture, Health & Sexuality► pp. 1 ff.
Jentoft, Elian Eve, Tony Sandset & Marit Haldar
2024. Problematizing loneliness as a public health issue: an analysis of policy in the United Kingdom. Critical Policy Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Lewis, Joseph & G. J. Melendez-Torres
2024. Prep-Tok: a queer critical discourse analysis of TikToks regarding HIV-related pre-exposure prophylaxis. Culture, Health & Sexuality 26:4 ► pp. 449 ff.
2023. From Acute Infection to Chronic Health Condition: The Role of the Social Sciences on the HIV/AIDS Global Epidemic. In Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health, ► pp. 1293 ff.
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Espejord, Idun Eskeland & Tony Sandset
2022. The Public Debates Regarding the Use of the Contraceptive Pill and PrEP: What can the Arguments Used Tell Us About Attitudes Surrounding Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Norway?. Sexuality & Culture 26:5 ► pp. 1561 ff.
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2022. Crime or culture? Representations of chemsex in the British press and magazines aimed at GBTQ+ men. Critical Discourse Studies 19:4 ► pp. 435 ff.
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2022. Radical contingency, radical historicity and the spread of ‘homosexualism’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of queer representation in The Times between 1957–1967 and 1979–1990. Discourse, Context & Media 48 ► pp. 100623 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.