First Advisor

Keith Walters

Date of Publication

Fall 11-6-2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Department

Applied Linguistics

Language

English

Subjects

Hispanic American men -- Health and hygiene -- Social conditions -- Interviews, HIV-positive men -- Health and hygiene -- Social conditions -- Interviews, English language -- Discourse analysis

DOI

10.15760/etd.2068

Physical Description

1 online resource (vi, 154 pages)

Abstract

Latino men, particularly those who have sex with other men, have been disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. Scholars have sought for nearly two decades to understand how various social and cultural factors in the Latino community exacerbate HIV risk among these men. Although following the advent of life-sustaining medications in 1996, HIV is often regarded as a manageable chronic illness, as opposed to a death sentence, scant attention has been devoted to how HIV-positive Latino men experience managing the illness. Among studies that have focused on HIV-positive persons' illness management, few Latino men have participated.

Using the Appraisal framework from Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, with Bucholtz and Hall's theory of social identity (2004, 2005), this discourse analysis sought to explore intersubjective relations as reported by five HIV-positive Latino men, three native-born and two immigrants, in semi-structured interviews that attempted to avoid preconceived expectations about salient structures. While structures such as homophobia, machismo, and stigma emerged in each interview, the native-born men's discourse differed from that of the immigrants in that the former did not address financial concerns with regard to HIV medications, whereas the latter represented their agency as having been constrained by low income requirements for obtaining assistance in accessing expensive HIV medications. This finding tentatively suggests that the issue could be more salient for immigrants than native-born Latinos and warrants additional, more focused research on the effects of the structures of benefit programs on HIV-positive Latino immigrants.

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Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/13162

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