Viral Voices. Digital storytelling, women and HIV in Podcast Positivos: Mujeres VIHvas project

Abstract: Despite being considered as the most social infection, there is little data on HIV infection in women. Women have not been considered beyond their reproductive role as subjects with a sexuality that transcends the historical mandate of biological reproduction, maintaining a secondary role in the infection. At the same time, society seems to have forgotten that the infection is still present. This thesis explores the voice of a group of positive women who, with their stories and through the digital narrative, will challenge the discourses that are established as hegemonic. In order to illustrate the potential of new tools as digital storytelling to disrupt and challenge the hegemonic herstory around women with HIV, the starting point for this thesis is Podcast Positivos: Mujeres VIHvas project. Engaging with the theories of intersectionality, performativity and cyborg, it will be argued the use of language, voice and the role of listening. Phenomenological research and narrative discourse analysis will be applied as methodologies to, on the one hand, address the experience of HIV as an important dimension in women's lives and, on the other hand, use their stories as a way to understand the meaning of those experiences. This thesis also discusses the creation of a cyber self, a viralized voice that is introduced into the already institutionalized podcast platform, to construct, deconstruct and challenge silences. Further, this thesis calls for an effort to listen, feel and write the stories of resistance of positive women and to put them into conversation within feminist academic debates.