Introduction
HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have taken many forms, ranging from pop-up stalls at LGBTQ+ Pride parades to circuit parties at popular queer venues. In this essay, we examine music artist Frank Ocean’s recent attempt to revivify the HIV prevention-access circuit party: a dance event primarily attended by gay men which emerged in cities in the United States to fundraise for …
Encountering PrEP
I became interested in PrEP as an object of anthropological research on the L train between 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan. It was the summer of 2014 and the global AIDS industry was humming with renewed biomedical triumphalism, hailing ‘the end of AIDS’ some argued PrEP and other scientific advances had made attainable (Kenworthy, Thomann, …
In the spirit of this series on a ‘critically applied’ approach to PrEP, this piece shows how thinking with the concept of marginality can contribute to an analysis of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and how this new HIV preventive technology can help us uncover issues of health disparities, even in spaces of affluence with state-provided health care. More specifically, this piece …
I have perhaps an unpopular position to declare: Although pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an enormous biomedical breakthrough in the prevention of HIV, it also symbolizes much of what is wrong in current global health practice.
Since 2013, I have been working on HIV prevention research in Kenya, which, as pointed out in this series introduction, has the second highest …
Introduction
…“I‘d been trying to get PrEP through my physician at the time, and …I had to print up all these studies and all the prescription information because my doctor was like, ‘Well, you don’t have HIV.’ And I’m like, ‘I know. That’s the point. I don’t want to get it.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, [Truvada] is not for that.’
The UNAIDS mission of “Getting to Zero” is supported by three key goals: “Zero infections. Zero deaths. Zero stigma.” By taking up this mission, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) increased its dedication to ending the epidemic. DPH aims to realize these goals by expanding access to PrEP, ensuring RAPID (Rapid ART Program for HIV Diagnoses) linkage to …