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

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

“…PrEP not only has the potential to bracket the historically sedimented affects of HIV cultivated in the first wave of HIV in countries of the Global North. It also heralds a simultaneous present-futurity that is HIV neutral (Florencio, 2020; Rangel and Crath, 2021). In other words, anti-HIV molecules circulating through bloodstreams register at the molar scale of the gay body politic, materialising an anticipated release from AIDS phobic and homophobic pasts deemed unrealisable in a pre-PrEP era (or at least according to current bio-pharmacological imaginaries).…”

“…We ground our explorations in research material generated from a New York City based pilot study. Read through a sociological, new materialist analytic (Crath et al, 2019;Lupton, 2019a and b;Fox and Aldred, 2017;Rangel and Crath, 2021), our research highlights the creative possibilities, tensions, and blockages that arise when fantasy, discourses, bodies and technologies entangle across different on-line and off-line sexual cultures. Our data also points to the different ways PrEP, in conjunction with other pharmaceutical and communications technologies, configures in the semiotics and emotions of risk-taking and in satisfying newly formulating articulations of gay men's sexual intimacies and fantasies.…”

“…PrEP has been embraced by vast segments of gay men, in particularly the insured, the educated, and overall, the well-off since access to PrEP is mediated by the pharmaceutical marketplace (Mayer et al, 2020). Indeed, PrEP now circulates freely in gay sexual circuits; it expresses in the on-line exchanges of gay men’s hook-up apps of choice, and in the intimacies enjoyed in off-line worlds (da Silva-Brandao and Ianni, 2020; Florencio, 2020; Rangel and Crath, 2021; Young et al, 2019). It has also been heralded as a biomedical salve for reclaiming sexual freedoms and ensuring gay reproductive futurities free from HIV.…”

The Public Debates Regarding the Use of the Contraceptive Pill and PrEP: What can the Arguments Used Tell Us About Attitudes Surrounding Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Norway?

“…Since we were interested in seeing how media discourses around the Pill and PrEP were similar (or dissimilar), our coding and subsequent theme generation had a deductive orientation as we actively searched for similarities across the two datasets. Our theoretical inspirations came from prior research on the intersection of sexuality such as the work of Foucault (Foucault, 1990(Foucault, , 2012a(Foucault, , 2012b, but also more contemporary research on the intersection between sexuality and pharmaceuticals such as in the work of Race (Race, 2009(Race, , 2016(Race, , 2017 and Preciado (Preciado, 2013). Since our work focused on such scholarship, we were interested in uncovering themes across the two datasets which were both similar and focused on discourses of power, morals, and the intersection between biomedical knowledge and social norms.…”