Biopolitics' new iteration: Gay men, Pre-exposure prophylaxis and the pharmaco-pornographic imagination

Abstract

This article builds upon Paul Preciado’s conceptualisation of pharmaco-pornographic power to understand the ongoing affects and effects of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) on queer men’s sexual socialities and subjectivities. Drawing from a new-materialist epistemology, we analyze data from a sexual health pilot study in NYC to trace the techno-sexual health assemblages forming in queer life worlds. Our analysis suggests that these assemblages, entangling PrEP and other pharmacological substances, pornographic imaginaries together with mediatic technologies and public health rationalties, are creating paradoxical desires and practices of intimacy that are both normative and exceed rational health-actor logics and normative understandings of risk. These effects have population-level biopolitical implications.

Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures

“…Instead, they can be neatly mapped on the contours of syndemic factors, which include biological risk profiles and the social policies that reproduce poverty, stigma and the marginalised of vulnerable social groups. In those cases, strategies that reduce risks of infections and their resulting medical and social harms, rely on accepting health risks as recalcitrant realities of human social life that can be managed, but not eradicated—in a search for a disease-free human futurity—even in increasingly biomedicalised health worlds (Crath, Rangel, and Gaubinger 2021). Equally important, they provide frameworks for working directly with the communities most affected, taking seriously their priorities, and the development of peer networks of care, support and advocacy (Shotwell 2020).…”

En introduktion til en skandinavisk hiv/aids-historie

“…Sådanne praeferencer for hiv-negativitet reproducerer hiv-fobi ved at afpolitisere og personliggøre spørgsmålet om tiltraekning (Spieldenner 2016). Omvendt understøtter det også betingelserne for seksuel fetishering af hiv-positivitet, som med udbredelsen af PrEP nu i mindre grad opererer som et sundhedsanliggende (Crath et al 2021), men i stigende grad bedre kan forstås som en af de fantasier eller erotiske troper, som homoseksuel sex bliver til i samspil med.…”