Abstract
Recent biomedical innovations in the field of HIV prevention and treatment – namely PrEP, TasP, and ‘undetectability’ – have completely reshaped the experience of living with HIV, as well as the meanings of ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ in relation to sexual practices, leading to new forms of pleasure and sociality for gay and bisexual men in the Minority World. While human geographers have been slow to engage with the changing social dimensions brought by these innovations, scholars across the whole spectrum of the social sciences have been far more creative and responsive contributing to a critical understanding of what these processes entail in terms of subject formation as well as social and communal relations. This article proposes a distinctly geographical contribution to analysing and interpreting these biomedical technologies, exploring the ways that new spatialities and spatial relations emerge from their use and circulation. Our approach is based on provisional assemblage thinking as it offers the possibility to think the complex connections between biomedical innovations in the field of HIV, sexual practices, subjectivity, pleasure, spaces, and technologies, going beyond the subdisciplinary preoccupations and methodological reflexes of geographers focused primarily on either health or sexuality.
Highlights
Since their emergence in the 1980s, HIV and AIDS have completely reconfigured gay and bisexual1 men’s sexuality and social life as well as forms of Dialogues in Human Geography XX(X)activism and political participation
Since Treatment as Prevention’ (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) rely on the same logic, and because they have increasingly been implemented as twinned public health interventions, this article thinks about these recent biomedical developments together in order to contribute to new perspectives on the geographies of HIV and to consider how they are reshaping gay and bisexual men’s lives – principally in Australia, North America, and Western Europe, as well as among social networks in major cities in other parts of the world
As we have argued throughout this paper, these health concerns are seldom divorced from a consideration of the ways in which PrEP might enable other individual and collective pleasures
Summary
Since their emergence in the 1980s, HIV and AIDS have completely reconfigured gay and bisexual men’s sexuality and social life as well as forms of Dialogues in Human Geography XX(X)activism and political participation. Since TasP and PrEP rely on the same logic (i.e. the use of anti-retroviral therapy to prevent HIV transmission), and because they have increasingly been implemented as twinned public health interventions, this article thinks about these recent biomedical developments together in order to contribute to new perspectives on the geographies of HIV and to consider how they are reshaping gay and bisexual men’s lives – principally in Australia, North America, and Western Europe, as well as among (often relatively affluent) social networks in major cities in other parts of the world. The aim of this paper is to outline and propose a distinctly geographical contribution to analysing these changing biomedical technologies, and their ‘capacity to reorganise social and material worlds’ (Race, 2018: 2), producing new, unanticipated, geographies in the process
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