Gay Men Living with HIV in England and Italy in Times of Undetectability: A Life Course Perspective

ollowing the ‘Swiss Statement’ in 2008, there is now established medical evidence that people living with HIV on therapies and with an undetectable viral load for more than 6 months cannot transmit the virus to others. Drawing from geographical analyses of the life course and the body, the chapter focuses on the impact of undetectability on the lives of gay men living with HIV in England and Italy, arguing that being diagnosed with HIV and the paradigm of undetectability represent turning points in the life course of people with HIV. To frame the relationship between HIV and the life course, the chapter adopts a geographical perspective centred on the body, conceptualized in relation to its materiality and fluidity, but also as a fundamental scale of analysis to understand the migration choices of people with HIV. Methodologically the chapter results from a comparative transnational project conducted between 2018 and 2020 and based on different research methods (an online survey, biographic interviews, interviews with service providers, media discourse analysis).