After the clinic? Researching sexual health technology in context

Abstract

There is great interest in what testing, pharmaceutical, information and social media technology can do for sexual health. Much programmatic and research activity is focused on assessing how these technologies can be used to best effect. Less obvious are analyses that place technology into historical, political and real-world settings. Developing an 'in-context' analysis of sexual health technology, this paper draws on interviews with leading community advocates, researchers and clinicians in Australia, Canada and the UK and looks across examples, including social media, rapid HIV testing, pre-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV and polymerase chain reaction Chlamydia testing. The analysis is framed by studies of techno-society and the dialectics of sex-affirmative advocacy with biomedical authority and attends to: the rationalistic and affective dimensions of the imaginary associated with technology; the role of technology in the re-spatialisation and re-temporalisation of the sexual health clinic; and the re-invention of technology in its real-world contexts. This in-context approach is important for: the effective implementation of new technology; strengthening the social science contribution to the field; and enriching social theory in general on life in techno-societies.

‘The world has changed’: pharmaceutical citizenship and the reimagining of serodiscordant sexuality among couples with mixed HIV status in Australia

“…This is what I wish to explore; if pharmaceutical citizenship can in fact have an inverse, liberatory effect and coincidentally un‐ discipline bodies and sexualities. Davis's (: 399) idea of ‘ repurposing ’ provides helpful stimulus here. It describes how the situated practices and effects of biomedical technologies ‘are not always pre‐figured and predictable’.…”

“…However, TasP is different from pharmasex in that the public health objective behind TasP is the prevention of HIV, not the sexual liberation and enhancement of people or couples living with HIV. But as my analysis suggests, one could argue that TasP becomes ‘repurposed’ by experience, by being situated in the midst of everyday life and relationships, which opens up new imaginaries and opportunities (Davis ). This ‘afterlife of therapies’ (Meyers ) not only remakes the medical therapy in question but also the illness or condition for which it is taken.…”

“…In this article, then, I am concerned with the potentialities rather than limitations of pharmaceutical citizenship. Drawing on concepts such as the afterlife (Meyers 2013) and repurposing (Davis 2015) of medical technologies, I explore whether TasP can open up new trajectories that unshackle serodiscordant sexuality from its historical and cultural moorings in discourses of risk and stigma, and whether this might enable the reimagining of serodiscordance as 'normal' and safe, potentially shifting the emphasis in HIV prevention discourses.…”

Embodied, clinical and pharmaceutical uncertainty: people with HIV anticipate the feasibility of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP)

“…More recently, researchers have been investigating the various ways in which TasP as a biomedical technology and a technology of biomedicalisation is playing out in the intimate and social lives of people with HIV: that is, investigating the emerging social and intimate uses of TasP beyond reductions in HIV transmission on a population level (Davis, 2015;Grace, et al, 2015;Persson, 2016).…”

Transformative Illegality: How Condoms ‘Became Legal’ in Ireland, 1991–1993

“…The new model they suggested embedded the demands of a changing society, that was redefining sexuality, and that activists were working with. The model proposed shifted from a system centred on the medical institution to one of market distribution that was breaking apart the spatial, temporal, but also symbolic limitations previously placed on sexual health, and sexuality (Davies 2015). Condom Sense played on the machines' latent ability to provoke.…”