Echoes and Antibodies: Legal Veridiction and the Emergence of the Perpetual Hepatitis C Subject

Abstract

New drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C have emerged. There is great optimism within medicine about the transformative potential of cure, but this overlooks the entrenched discrimination and stigma associated with both hepatitis C and injecting drug use and the role of law in re/producing it. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders such as policymakers, lawyers, and representatives from peer organisations (N = 30), Latour’s (2013) work on legal veridiction, Fraser and Seear’s (2011) conceptualisation of hepatitis C as a ‘gathering’, and Mol’s (2021) work on being, this paper explores the possibility that legal processes complicate the linear trajectory of progress and transformation cure promises. Our participants’ identify various legal processes that allow hepatitis C to echo or linger in people’s lives after treatment. These processes are remaking hepatitis C, and making perpetual hepatitis C subjects. We argue that we must grapple with these forces in the era of cure.

Complicating cure: How Australian criminal law shapes imagined post‐hepatitis C futures

“…For instance, in other work, we have found that the effects of judgement and stigma can persist even post‐cure, with the lingering presence of antibodies sometimes interpreted as proof the person still ‘has’ the virus and is ‘infectious’, thus posing a ‘risk’ to others (Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). We have also argued that biomedical imaginaries can help to generate and sustain stigma (Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). That is, various forces and factors, including poverty and homelessness, shape access to treatment (Farrugia et al., 2022 ).…”

“…Hepatitis C is enacted as a particular kind of problem, without distinction between those who were asymptomatic, had cleared the virus, had not known they had it and experienced severe symptoms. Importantly, as we have argued elsewhere, the Peters case demonstrates the law’s ‘potential to generate new harms by stigmatising all those with hepatitis C, those cured, and those at risk, even as [it] recognises the women infected with it as victims of a terrible wrong’ (Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). It is important to acknowledge the constitutive work being done by the uncertainty of disease progression here, as well as anticipation or supposition: The mere anticipation of symptoms or side effects can be enough to render something serious.…”

“…Given the strong focus on hepatitis C in criminal cases, we chose to focus on these for the purpose of this article. Our other publications address hepatitis C in other areas of law (e.g., Seear, Fraser, Farrugia et al., in press ; Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). The 98 criminal cases were decided between 1992 and 2020 were decided after the announcement that DAAs would be added to the PBS.…”

“…Both the disease and its treatment were disabling for many people. Indeed, in some parts of the world, including Australia, hepatitis C is a recognised disability, and people who have been diagnosed may become eligible for disability pensions or other entitlements, including protections under disability discrimination legislation (Seear, Fraser, Farrugia et al., in press ; Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). Writing about combination therapy, Fraser and Seear ( 2011 ) argued that treatment pathways and experiences were also inseparable from the politics of injecting drug use and ‘addiction’ and that the treatment process was highly stigmatising.…”

“…These approaches can, of course, change over time. It is surprising, then, given the central role of the law in the construction of disability, normalcy and deviance that academics have almost totally neglected the law’s relationship to hepatitis C and disability (although see Seear, Fraser, Mulcahy et al., in press ). The work of Science and Technology Studies scholar Bruno Latour provides an especially useful framework for exploring these relationships, with its focus on how the law makes sense of the world, produces knowledge about it and shapes it.…”