Queer STS Reading Group

In this very recent article, published in a fascinating special issue of Surveillance & Society on queer surveillance, Orne and Gall discuss the uptake and dissemination of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the US as an emergent site of surveillance of queer sexuality and of queer self-surveillance. Orne and Gall forward PrEP regimes in the USA as a case study in Steven Epstein’s concept of “biosexual citizenship,” understood as a top-down and bottom-up (dialectic) process of defining sexual rights/norms in relation to the biomedical. This essay should be a rich source of discussion, since it injects a vital perspective into a cultural conversation about PrEP that is so often cast into a dichotomy of risk/liberation to political ends.

The essay can be found here: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/12945

The abstract is as follows:

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a revolutionary public health strategy to prevent HIV infection but comes with a significant personal and structural surveillance regime. Using interview data with gay, bi, and queer men on PrEP, field notes, and document analysis, we discuss the individual and institutional practices that produce what we call PrEP citizenship. Drawing on the concept of biosexual citizenship, we show how PrEP citizenship involves surveillance for compliance with use and behavioural guidelines, expanding the PrEP population, and allocating community resources to PrEP users over non-PrEP users. On the individual level, users surveil themselves and others for proper use and sexual behaviour, identify nonusers and evangelize PrEP use to them, and stigmatize non-PrEP users as irresponsible, immoral, and potentially infectious. Similarly, on the institutional level, public health, medical authorities, and sexual community infrastructure work to ensure PrEP users remain adherent, increase the user base, and grant material and symbolic resources to PrEP users. PrEP citizenship has implications for the role of the co-production of surveillance in conceptions of biosexual citizenship.