The Beatification of the Clinic: Instituting New HIV Prevention Health Conducts in the Age of Biomedical Prevention - Kane Race

Date: Thursday 4 April 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EZ.G.23, Western Sydney University Parramatta South campus

The Beatification of the Clinic: Instituting New HIV Prevention Health Conducts in the Age of Biomedical Prevention

Professor Kane Race (University of Sydney)

Discussant: Associate Professor Denis Byrne

Abstract

The clinically-confirmed effectiveness of the antiretroviral medications, initially used to treat HIV disease by preventing transmission of the virus, have precipitated a wide-ranging redesign of HIV prevention, education and care services around the world. Today practices of HIV testing, treatment uptake and pharmaceutical prophylaxis on the part of key affected populations are now front and centre of HIV prevention policy internationally. To optimize the effectiveness of ‘biomedical prevention’, gay community-based health agencies have introduced peer-based, non-judgmental ‘community clinics’ to promote wide-scale HIV testing and treatment referral for those at risk of, or diagnosed with, HIV. To maximise their reach and accessibility, these services tend to frame sex as a valid form of pleasure and experimentation rather than an object of moral correction. Rather than subjecting sex to disciplinary modification, new forms of engagement with biomedicine are conceived to produce healthier sexual citizens. In this paper I draw on the later work of Foucault to situate these developments in relation to a longer history of collective experimentation with bodies, pleasures, drugs, intimate and erotic practices that can be regarded as a distinctive feature of gay community responses to HIV/AIDS. I discuss how gay sexual and subcultural vernaculars and aesthetics are finding their way into biomedical service provision through dedicated initiatives that seek to optimize the effectiveness of biomedical prevention and deliver on its promise of bringing HIV transmission to an end in coming years.  While social scientists have framed the new paradigm of HIV prevention as a textbook example of intensified biomedicalization, I argue that an alternative framing may be more pragmatic and more generative. I characterize these new developments as a case of the experimental sexual socialization of the clinic; an instance of incorporating medical and sexual culture in which new modes of engagement with biomedical technologies and practices on the part of affected communities are promoted, fostered and brought into being.

Biography

Professor Kane Race is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on matters of HIV prevention, sexuality, drug use, biomedicine, care practices and digital culture. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Duke University Press, 2009), Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (co-authored with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, MIT Press, 2015), and The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV (Routledge, 2018).