Narrating Lives with HIV and COVID-19; Narratives as COVID-19 Theory

This chapter explores what we can learn about living with COVID-19, theoretically as well as experientially, from the stories of ‘pandemic experts’ living with HIV alongside COVID-19, in Zambia, Brazil, the UK, and South Africa. Research involved mid-to-late 2020 semi-structured interviews with 76 participants in these four countries about the impact of COVID-19 alongside HIV on their resource constraints and possibilities. Interviews were analysed narratively, addressing thematic, structural, and positional elements. We approached narratives, not just as representations of lives, but as explanations or theorisations of those lives, and as resources in themselves. In analysing Zambian participants’ narratives, we discuss how the stories express various forms of structural inequalities, and link COVID-19’s local and national to its international effects. We examine how Brazilian participants’ stories theorised their COVID-19 era lives in relation to Brazil’s political history of health care and HIV activism. We explore how UK participants’ narratives explained citizenly marginalisation and restitutions for people living with HIV illness alongside COVID-19, particularly for those living with other illness or disabilities, poverty, and racism, and for those who were born outside the UK. Finally, we explicate how South African participants’ complex narratives traced the intersectionalities of COVID-19, HIV, gender, racialisation, violence, citizenship status, and migration. Overall, this chapter demonstrates the value of attending to the narratives of ‘pandemic experts’ living with HIV as both theorisers of and activists within the COVID-19 pandemic.