Making LGBT health: queer citizenship, community and government in Australia after AIDS

Abstract

Making LGBT Health: queer citizenship, community and government in Australia after AIDS

Abstract

This thesis examines the category of 'LGBT health' and its role in shaping contemporary queer politics. It argues that the formation of this category is constructing, mediating and shaping LGBT subjects and communities. Making LGBT health is based on analysis of interviews with LGBT health organisation leaders and advocates, and analysis of documents and texts produced by these organisations and Australian state, territory and federal governments. It draws on and engages with queer theory and critical work on the politics of public health.

The first part of Making LGBT health examines how LGBT health became an established public health concern in Australia. It begins with a genealogical analysis of how gay and bisexual men were constituted as citizens through their relationship with government during the AIDS crisis, and how queer women and trans advocates also utilised the politics of AIDS to make their identities and concerns intelligible. It then explores how the category of LGBT health was mobilised to extend concern about the health of sexuality and gender diverse people beyond HIV, including through the creation of government-led LGBT health strategies.

The second part of the thesis comprises three critical analyses of LGBT health discourse and practice. The first examines the response of LGBT health organisations to the outbreak of COVID-19 in Australia, with a particular focus on how HIV figured within their health promotion and advocacy materials. The second examines the constitution of queer women's smoking as a public health problem, with a focus on the discourse of 'minority stress'. The third explores the space and atmosphere of the LGBT clinic and how these spaces both respond to queer discomfort with medicine and materialise some of the concerns of LGBT health.

Overall, Making LGBT health argues that public health has become concerned with caring for all aspects of queer life. No longer is public health driven by an imperative to contain non-normative genders or sexualities, or the diseases associated with them. Instead, public health has become concerned with producing healthy and productive queer subjects. While this concern is generating new possibilities for what constitutes healthy LGBT subjectivity and citizenship, it is also producing ideas of the normative and disciplined queer subject, against which non-normative practices are constituted as problems requiring intervention. Show more