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The Beatification of the Clinic: Biomedical Prevention ‘From Below’

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Remaking HIV Prevention in the 21st Century

Part of the book series: Social Aspects of HIV ((SHIV,volume 5))

Abstract

With the introduction of biomedical prevention, gay community-based agencies around the world have sought to optimise biomedical prevention by establishing non-judgmental, anonymous community-based clinics offering rapid HIV and STI testing in shopfronts, mobile clinics and gay neighbourhoods. To maximise their accessibility these services frame sex as a valid form of pleasure and experimentation rather than object of moral correction. Rather than subjecting sex to disciplinary modification, new forms of engagement with biomedicine are conceived to produce ‘healthier sexual citizens’. Undoubtedly these modes of implementing biomedical prevention represent a case of intensified biomedicalisation. But they can also be situated as continuous with a history of collective experimentation with bodies, pleasures and care practices that has long distinguished gay community-based, pragmatic responses to HIV. Drawing on Foucault’s later work on pleasure and the aesthetics of existence, this chapter characterises these experiments as part of a ‘beatification of the clinic’ and raises the provocative possibility of biomedical prevention from below.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An article entitled ‘the normalization of AIDS in Western European countries’ describes how the ‘exceptional innovations in prevention, patient care, health policy and questions of civil rights’ that characterised the initial emergence of AIDS gave way to a state of normalisation in health policy at this moment (Rosenbrock et al. 2000, p. 1607).

  2. 2.

    ‘The development of PREP was spearheaded by an interaction between the gay and public health communities through an integration of gay stakeholders in the processes of the three most important PREP-MSM studies iPrex, Ipergay and Proud’ (Schubert 2019, p. 137)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Kane Race

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  1. Kane Race
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Correspondence to Kane Race .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Sarah Bernays

  2. Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Adam Bourne

  3. Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Kensington, New South Wales, Australia

    Susan Kippax

  4. Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney, Kensington, New South Wales, Australia

    Peter Aggleton

  5. Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA

    Richard Parker

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Race, K. (2021). The Beatification of the Clinic: Biomedical Prevention ‘From Below’. In: Bernays, S., Bourne, A., Kippax, S., Aggleton, P., Parker, R. (eds) Remaking HIV Prevention in the 21st Century. Social Aspects of HIV, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69819-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69819-5_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69818-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69819-5

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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