(Where) do queer women belong? Theorizing intersectional and compulsory heterosexism in HIV research.

Queer women have been elided from HIV discourse, in part due to heterosexist constructions of HIV transmission risk categories that omit women’s sexual orientation. In this paper, I reflect on presenting at two international HIV research conferences on queer women and their erasure from HIV discourse. I employ critical discourse analysis to conference interactions to investigate how my personal experiences as a queer woman presenting at these HIV conferences mirrored queer women’s marginalization in HIV research. Reactions to my presentations focused on dominant biomedical and neoliberal discourses that neglect social and structural drivers of the epidemic. These interactions also highlighted intersectional and compulsory heterosexism where the context, topics, and structures of discourse were called into question in ways that (re)produced queer women’s invisibility and institutional, social, and material exclusion. This paper calls for HIV researchers to integrate analyses of women’s complex sexualities and reconsider the purpose of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]