Viral Hauntology: Specters of AIDS in Infrastructures of Gay Sexual Sociability

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

“…While M disciplines himself to the daily regimen of PrEP intake so that he remains ‘safe’, he simultaneously explores ways in which sexual encounters can regain that charge of unpredictability and transgression. Here, the delineation between danger, risk and pleasure appear to blur and exceed the biological risk of viral transmission and indeed PrEP discourse’s normativising force (Møller and Leden, 2021). Queer intimacy, for M and other participants extends towards a ‘not knowing’ something about your partner and the possibility that they may affect you, change you, in unexpected ways.…”

“…This assemblage of bodies, drugs, discourses of risk and danger and digital communications technologies worked to elide the possibility that numerous party participants might in fact be adhering to safer-sex technologies via their privatised practices of PrEP or TasP use (this was indeed true at least for C) (Møller and Leden, 2021; Møller, 2020; Mowlabocus, 2021). Thus, despite the fact that technologies of risk mitigation might have been operating at molecular scales, what mattered for participants was that the fantasy of dangerousness, of ‘seeding’ was being performatively played out in the chem sex scene.…”