Género, generación y estigma. Discursos (multi)mediáticos sobre el VIH

The study analyses a corpus of multimedia journalistic discourses featuring people living with HIV in Spain, with the aim of exploring patterns in the use of deictic forms as markers of identity, agency and enunciative distance. The analysis is based on the theoretical frameworks of stigma (Goffman 1963; Link & Phelan 2001) and discursive positioning (Davies, Harré 1990) and pays special attention to gender and age variables. The results reveal significant differences in the use of deictic forms according to the group: older women tend to narrate their experience from a biographical ‘I’ and to use the identity-marking ‘you’ as a form of empathic generalisation with the normative role of woman and mother, as well as to achieve deictic distancing; older men articulate a ‘I’ that oscillates between the emotional and the testimonial, incorporating stigmatising social voices; young men, on the other hand, resort to ‘I’ as a form of critical self-affirmation and ‘we’ as a strategy of narrative politicisation. The analysis of the use of the third person shows how stigma is externalised through the evocation of medical, social or family voices, which function as agents of judgement or discrimination. These external voices, integrated into dynamics of discursive polyphony, allow us to observe how speakers negotiate, internalise or resist dominant representations of HIV status. Finally, the absence of testimonies from young women with HIV raises questions about the mechanisms of invisibility and self-exclusion in the public sphere.