Policing the seropositive body: From individual viral loads to the public spectacle of criminal prosecutions for HIV non-disclosure

• In Event: Back to the Future: The Construction of Time and Prisoner Reentry

Abstract

In this presentation, I discus the emergence of the HIV “treatment as prevention” (TasP) paradigm (a constellation of biomedical diagnostic, therapeutic, and surveillance technologies) in the Canadian context. TasP involves scaling up HIV testing and early initiation onto antiretroviral therapy to reduce new infections. While TasP has promise for increasing access to testing and treatment, it has emerged in parallel with a troubling number of prosecutions for HIV non-disclosure. These two trends recently converged in a Canadian Supreme Court decision that made viral load (an important measure of the success of TasP) a legal criterion for establishing whether someone has a duty to disclose their HIV status. I argue that TasP and the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure constitute two poles of an apparatus of capture that seeks to securitise the ‘immunity’ of the population. Here the law and medicine conspire to produce a bio-juridical gaze that compels people living with HIV to be adherent and subject themselves to ongoing viral load monitoring that produces data with utility in both medical and legal domains. In turn, people living with HIV are responding by stylizing themselves as certain kinds of ethical seropositive subjects who continuously monitor, evaluate, and confess their viral status.

Authors

• Adrian Guta, Carleton University

• Alexander McClelland, Concordia University