Managing risk, managing affects: The emerging biopolitics of HIV neutrality

Abstract

Discourses of HIV status neutrality have emerged in the wake of advances in biomedical technologies for HIV prevention and treatment of HIV. The combined effects of Treatment as Prevention (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) give rise to the possibility of dramatically curbing new HIV infections and nurture fantasies about an HIV-free/risk-free futurity. In this article, we consider the possibilities of HIV neutrality as a social-material assemblage entangling different institutional investments and practices, discourses about HIV risk and prevention, historical memories, political rationalities, and as a generative point of contact between and across different actors, institutions and objects. We explore the different logics and sentiments that are being drawn together in three different sites where HIV neutrality is configured. Borrowing from cultural and social science approaches that grapple with emotions and feelings as ‘distributed phenomena’ that carry political and social significance, we interrogate the work of HIV neutrality in effecting new tensions in the affective economies underpinning gay sexual socialities’ relation to HIV/AIDS and HIV risk. Our analysis suggests that as these new social-material strategies emerge to manage HIV risk, they entangle historically sedimented effects of HIV/AIDS. We ask to what extent these assemblages are productive of new intimacies and alliances, and possibly renewed entrenchments of bio-social boundaries cutting across gay male socialities in North America.