At a meeting last night, the subject of this campaign was brought up. There was one comment from someone at the table that he felt that there was a paradox with this campaign in that by (if I understood correctly, as we didn’t have time to get into it) putting this stigma campaign out there we may be creating more stigma.

I’m open to all discussion. This fellow is someone who knows and grasps the realities of living with HIV, and stimga on personal and systemic levels. I respect his point of view.

What do others think? Do we visually reinforce stigma by having HIV Stigma as the title? Would we be generating homophobia by having a Gay Stigma campaign. I can kind of see his point to a degree.

I’m not suggesting that his viewpoint is motivated by political correctness, I think there is more to it that how the campaign called itself, and I look forward to exploring this with him.

However in thinking about some of the reasons why one might think that the campaign in itself could be stigmatizing I have to think about language. And when I think about language it’s not always about righting off the need at how we look at it as a simply case of PC’ness.

Are we on the cusp of looking at different language, and if so, is it because we really need to do, or are we entering the never ending cycle of political correctness of changing labels and then as the former semantic baggage moves on to the new title, a new label is created until we have reached the status of anti-immune-suppressing-viral-apprehension campaign?

Is a rose still a rose by another name, or in the third decade do we have take a new look at how we present and look at these issues.