Antiretroviral Time: Gay Sex, Pornography, and Temporality ‘post-Crisis’
Florencio, J
Date: 31 August 2020
Journal
Somatechnics
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The introduction of combination antiretroviral therapies in 1996 brought about a radical change in
the temporality of HIV infection, moving us away from the event-time of the AIDS crisis to the
expanded/expansive temporality of chronic ‘undetectability’. That, and the later extension of
antiretrovirals as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, ...
The introduction of combination antiretroviral therapies in 1996 brought about a radical change in
the temporality of HIV infection, moving us away from the event-time of the AIDS crisis to the
expanded/expansive temporality of chronic ‘undetectability’. That, and the later extension of
antiretrovirals as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, has dramatically shifted the lived temporalities of both
sex and subjectivity among gay men who were able to access the new medical protocols for testing,
managing, and preventing HIV. In this essay, I draw from field work carried out in Berlin, Los
Angeles, and San Francisco, and analysis of gay pornography, to map the new temporalities of sex
and subjectivity that have been catalysed by the introduction of antiretroviral drugs, speculating on
their limits and queer political potential, situated as they are at the intersection of neoliberal regimes
of biomedical self-administration and sex understood as both an aesthetics and poetics of existence.
If modernity developed through an incessant rationalisation of time, including of lived, embodied
time, I argue that antiretroviral time has triggered the emergence of sexual behaviours and
subjectivities that open up new avenues for thinking 21st-century triangulations of sex, subjectivity,
and resistance being experimented with in bedrooms, sex clubs, and bathhouses across the
developed world.
French
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