AIDS Education and Social Practice

1、a walk in the park: frames and positioning in aids prevention outreach among gay men in china a earlier version of this paper was delivered at the georgetown university roundtable on languages and linguistics, march 8, 2001 (jones 2001a). the same data is also discussed in my phd. dissertation (jone

2、s 2001b).rodney h. jonescity university of hong kongabstractthis paper explores the interactional negotiation of identity in the distribution of aids prevention materials to gay men in public parks in china and how this negotiation affects the way people respond to aid prevention messages. data from

3、 the observation of an unofficial aids educator distributing materials in beijing parks in 1996 is analyzed using interactional sociolinguistic principles developed by scollon (1997) in his study of handing in public places. the analysis reveals how complex the negotiation of identity in such situat

4、ions is, requiring participants to take up multiple positions in multiple, overlapping frames of activity. the ways the aids educator and his targets manage the shifts in framing and positioning demanded by the situation plays an important role in determining how successfully the aids educator was i

5、s in delivering his message and making his targets believe it is relevant to them. aids education and social practicethe effectiveness of health prevention messages depends not just on the content of the messages, but also on how they are delivered and the identities that those who deliver them clai

6、m for themselves and impute onto their targets. this can be easily seen in the three pictures below which portray the delivery of information about hiv/aids on city streets in china. fig. 1fig.2fig. 3the first picture (fig.1), from the beijing review (cui 1997) shows a doctor extending her hand, whi

7、ch contains a sheath of papers, over a row of exhibition boards. no other hand, however, is seen extending from the opposite side of the picture to accept her offer. her identity as a prevention expert is signaled by her dress which includes a white coat and surgical mask, and in many ways the pract

8、ice of handing in which she is engaged is dependent on the identity she claims though her costume. the activity is framed as an exchange of medical information, not unlike a clinical consultation, and, as in most interaction of this kind, the boundary between expert and novice is clearly marked by t

9、he boundary of exhibition boards that separates the hander from the (potential) receivers. the identity imputed onto passers-by is that of patients (or prospective patients), which might be one reason why nobody is accepting the offer. the second picture (fig. 2) shows a more complete representation

10、 of the practice of handing: the hander, also bearing a conspicuous marker of her identity in the form of a sash that reads: spiritual civilization volunteer (精神文明義務(wù)), extending her hand to a recipient who looks at the papers it contains and, with some apparent difficulty, takes them into his hand w

11、hich is already occupied by a suitcase. in this instance, the clothing and behavior of the participants place the activity of aids education within the frame of a political campaign, a frame which is reinforced by the identity of the receiver, a peoples liberation army soldier. the participants are

12、positioned as good citizens, and receiving the materials more a matter of patriotic duty than good health. the third instance of handing (fig.3), taken from the far eastern economic review (forney 1998), is not strictly handing but taking, the figure on the left rolling up a free poster on aids prev

13、ention designed with drawings by chinese children. the outstretched hand of the previous pictures has been replaced by a table upon which the items to be taken are placed, and behind this prevention workers stand, much like shop assistants, identified in an interesting act of interdiscursivity by bo

14、th doctors coats and baseball caps. in this instance, aids education is placed into a consumerist frame: the materials themselves have taken on the status of commodities and the takers are positioned more as costumers than targets perhaps one reason why recipients in this picture are noticeably more

15、 enthusiastic compared to those in the first two.the contrast in these three examples provides an important lesson not just in the act of handing but in the practice of hiv/aids prevention and health education in general. most previous approaches to studying the discourse of hiv/aids prevention have

16、 focused on either analyzing health messages themselves or on analyzing the behavior of people after such messages have been delivered to them. among the most crucial determinants of how effective such texts are in preventing aids, however, is the moment when they are handed from one person to anoth

17、er and the kinds of identities which are opened up (or not opened up) in this action. because of the stigma associated with hiv infection, claims and imputations of identity in hiv/aids education and counseling always involve the risk of invoking what goffman (1963) calls spoiled identities, and so

18、often involve complex demands on participants communicative competence. linguistic studies of counseling sessions in clinical contexts reveal something of this complexity. conversation analysts like silverman and perakyla (silverman 1994, 1997, silverman and perakyla 1990), for example, have shown h

19、ow even subtle interactional features like pauses, hedges, and the structure of turn taking in hiv counseling sessions act as tools with which participants control the imputation and assumption of social identities. anthropological linguists like leap (1990, 1995) have noted how, in similar counseli

20、ng sessions, participants choose features of grammar and discourse to create a relationship between themselves and hiv, with the norm being that participants attempt to put as much discursive space between themselves and the virus as possible. discourse analysts, like moore and her colleagues (moore

21、, et al. 2001, candlin, et al.1998, plum et al. 1998), working in the context of hiv medicine, have noted how in consultations doctors and patients mobilize lexical choices, patterns of pronoun usage and deixis, and interactional features such as of turn taking structures and feedback, to negotiate

22、issues of power and expertise. the interactional demands of these simple acts of handing, however, are in some ways even more complex than counseling sessions and medical consultations where participants generally have a longer time to do their interactional business, targets of the intervention are

23、 there on a voluntary basis and the interaction takes place on the turf of the expert. in the action of handing a piece of information to someone on the street, or in similar kinds of outreach situations, the expert is off of his or her turf, and the relationship between participants does not come r

24、eady made, but must be negotiated within a very narrow window of opportunity that may last for only a few seconds. handingin the first issue of the journal of sociolinguistics, ron scollon (1997) explored the way people hand objects and texts to others on the streets of hong kong, arguing that an ex

25、amination of the practice of handing in public places allows us to develop a closer analysis of the interpretative processes by which strangers impute, claim, ratify or contest publicly available identities (41). as scollon points out, and the analysis above confirms, the ways identities are managed

26、 in such moments of social practice depends on the way participants frame what they are doing (bateson 1972, goffman 1974, tannen 1983) and position themselves (davies and harre 1990) within those frames. according to scollon (1998: 6), all social interaction involves three fundamental concerns: est

27、ablishing the basis for the interaction, establishing the relationships and positioning among the participants, and framing events. framing involves both the primary frameworks (bateson 1972) through which participants signal the activity being engaged in, and the interactive frames through which th

28、ey manage their moment by moment alignment with each other (goffman 1974). in scollons (1997) analysis, the negotiation and ratification of social identity in the act of handing in public places is governed by multiple frames determined by the social situation, regulations regarding public order and

29、 the nature of the object being handed. each frame has its own set of actions that are permitted, normal, and appropriate and signal actors rights to be doing what they are doing where and when they are doing it. in figure one, for example, the boundaries between frame of the exhibition and the soci

30、al situation of walking on the street within which it is erected are clear. within this frame, it is normal and appropriate for the doctor to be dressed as she is and offering texts to passersby, whereas such behavior in the social situation frame of walking on the street without the benefit of the

31、exhibition frame would be considered inappropriate, and for one of the pedestrians to also begin passing out their own printed materials about aids would neither be considered normal nor permitted in china. within these frames there are also interactive frames, signaled by cues such as gestures, utt

32、erances, posture and gaze, the outstretched hand in figure one, for instance signaling the frame of an offer and activating the interactional dynamics that are associated with it. passersby may refuse the offer, they may simply take the materials and leave, or they may enter into another set of inte

33、ractive frames with the doctor involving the interactional dynamics of perhaps asking and answering questions, persuading, or making arrangements for an hiv antibody test. positioning refers more to the roles participants take up in the ongoing storyline of the interaction, it is, as davies and harr

34、e (1990) define it: the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines. by giving people parts in a story, whether it be explicit or implicit, a speaker makes available a subject position which the ot

35、her speaker in the normal course of events would take up. (para. 18)storylines, however, always have multiple levels, including the story of the immediate interaction, the story of the history of interactions between or among these participants, and larger cultural storylines (carbaugh 1999, jones 2

36、001b), the community or societys histories of this kind of interaction between or among these kinds of people. the sash in picture three, for example, signals both the volunteers role in the immediate storyline in which this act of handing is an episode, as well as in a larger cultural storyline abo

37、ut the history of the campaign to promote spiritual civilization and of political campaigns in general. it is in fact it is her place in this cultural storyline that gives her the right to assume the role which she does in the more immediate storyline. just like frames, storylines and the positions

38、they make available have associated with them various procedural rules regarding such things as behavior, the proper sequence of actions, speaking rights and turn taking. the procedural rules of both frames and positions grow up within the communities of practice (lave and wenger 1992) associated wi

39、th such sites of engagement (scollon 1997), and it is in part through enacting knowledge of these rules that participants show themselves to be legitimate members of these communities. thus, in acts of handing like those pictured above, an instance of public discourse like an aids prevention pamphle

40、t becomes a tool not just for the promotion of aids prevention, but also for the claims and imputations of identity through which, as scollon (1997a: 44) writes, individuals go about the quotidian reproduction of their community of practice. one thing that complicates such public acts of handing, ho

41、wever, (and most other public acts as well) is that they typically require participants to take up positions within multiple, overlapping frames, each with different sets of procedural rules. the doctor in figure one, for example, uncomfortably straddles two different positions in two different fram

42、es: dressed for a medical consultation, he finds it is he who must seek out the patients rather than the other way around. similarly, the volunteers in figure three, simultaneously positioned as experts and salespeople, might find it challenging to juggle answering medical questions with packing up

43、their customers parcels. what determines to a great degree the usefulness and impact of these acts of health promotion is participants ability to manage this interperformativity (scollon 1997), to shift skillfully from frame to frame, from position to position, weaving all of the different storyline

44、s of the interaction together. this paper examines the ways identities are claimed and imputed in the handing of aids prevention information in circumstances in which the demands for skillful interperformativity are particularly acute. unraveling this interperformativty reveals how the moment by mom

45、ent negotiation of positions and frames between individuals lays the foundations for the alignment people take up in relation to the message itself and aids prevention in general.aids prevention among gay men in chinain the last section i discussed three different instances of the handing of aids pr

46、evention materials on public streets in china. the following three examples portray the same activity, but in a very different kind of context. example 1a: not many people here today.b: .a: do you think there are a lot of people or not? b: i dont know. im not from around here.example 2b: are you sel

47、ling this?a: its free. b: why are you giving away this kind of thing?example 3a: hello.b: hello. (as pager rings. he takes it out of his pocket and reads the message.)b: what do you want?a: nothing. if these examples seem unusual it is because they are taken from my observations of the distribution

48、of aids prevention materials in circumstances in which the negotiation of social identity for both the hander and the recipient is especially complex. the setting is a park in beijing in 1996. potential recipients of the materials are men who have sex with men, many of them for money, in search of p

49、otential partners (or, as they refer to it, fishing). the hander is not a public health worker, but an unofficial aids prevention activist, and the materials he is distributing are not domestically produced or approved by the chinese health authorities, but instead pamphlets designed especially for

50、gay men produced by an ngo in hong kong which include images which many law enforcement officials in china might regard as pornographic (see figs. 4 and 5). fig. 4 (aids concern 1995)fig. 5 (aids concern 1995)in recent years, with renewed emphasis by the government on aids prevention and control (pa

51、n 2001) and a more accepting stance by both officials and the medical community towards homosexuality (wan 2001), men who have sex with men in china have had increasing opportunities to encounter aids prevention messages through social gatherings at bars and discos, telephone hotlines providing peer

52、 counseling (beijing comrades hotline 1999) and internet web sites (see for example guangzhou comrade 2000). in 1996, however, the opportunities for aids education among this population were severely constrained by both official reluctance to address the issue of homosexuality and difficulties for n

53、on-members in accessing this relatively invisible community (jones 2001b, li 1998, wan 1999). at that time there was only one officially sanctioned piece of aids prevention material for gay men (china ministry of health et al. 1995), and distribution was hampered by lack of resources and lack of kno

54、wledge among health workers as to how and where to distribute it (jones 2001). in some large cities, aids education was taken up in an informal way by men who have sex with men themselves, many of whom were early activists in what is now an increasingly visible cultural movement around gay identity.

55、 prevention activities included such things as informal get-togethers, or salons (jin 1993, aizhi action 1998) and the distribution of aids prevention materials like that pictured above (usually procured from hong kong or taiwan) through informal networks of friends or at fishing ponds such as city

56、parks. the data for this study was collected by observing one such activist distributing pamphlets in three different parks in beijing on a single day between three in the afternoon and ten at night.as can be seen in the above examples, the ways identities are claimed, imputed, accepted or rejected

57、under these circumstances, and the consequences involved in such claims and imputations, are subtle and multi-layered both for the prevention worker and the men who gather in the park to fish. example one shows how the prevention worker, in order to gain access to his targets, must claim for himself

58、 (and impute on his target) the identity of an insider, claims and imputations that in the activity of fishing are usually not issued directly upon initial contact but rather negotiated in more indirect ways like, as in the example, implying and assuming familiarity with the venue, in this case a pa

59、rk which is particularly well know as a fishing pond (魚池) by both local beijingers and msm from other cities and provinces (not many people here today). example two attests to how unusual the practice of handing in these circumstances is, with the recipient initially interpreting the offer as a sales pitch and expressing disbelief that t