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 this short piece, I explore how medical anthropology could be deployed through interdisciplinary collaborations in a way that is both theoretically rich and poised to positively impact health outcomes. In particular, I consider how research agendas focused on improving health care outcomes reveal certain limitations and underlying assumptions within the discipline. What types of methodological shifts might occur if …
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 …