Abstract
New questions are arising today with the development of highly active antiretroviral therapies and longer life expectancy for people with HIV; questions are raised concerning the impact of the diagnosis and the medical care proposed. Some people manage to resist biomedical care orders and to preserve the leisure time they engaged in prior to the diagnosis, while others give up these social and leisure time activities or get involved in associations where the activities become part of the planned therapy. The data in the article weres collected during two surveys: one about the involvement in sports and physical activities of people living with HIV (PLWHIV), using a questionnaire (n = 619), and one about social involvement, with semi-structured interviews (n = 21) and through participant observation of the activities proposed by four associations in Languedoc-Roussillon. The data show that the choice of spare time activities is linked to the social and health situations of the participants together with the kind of HIV experience that they have had. Leisure time activities do not go against the alternative between two perspectives, either to preserve a ‘normal’ life or to appropriate the status of a chronically sick person; furthermore these two logics run through every aspect of the lives of the PLWHIV.