Queer Experiments and Chemical Intimacies: HIV Prophylactics in and around Bangkok

• In Event: Queer Elements

Abstract

This paper examines queer experiments with drugs that are happening in relation to infrastructures that have emerged in Bangkok to promote and expand access to Thai GPO manufactured generic HIV prophylactic drugs. Since its arrival to the market, Global LGBT media have lauded PrEP as a “game-changer,” while both sexual rights activists and public health workers alike have analogized PrEP to birth-control, suggesting that ‘the pill’ will usher in a sexual revolution for gay men, trans women, and other sexual minority populations. Given the presence of a state manufactured generic, the relative affordability of PrEP in Bangkok has elicited new forms of medical and sexual tourism, interacting with the city’s already eminent image as a “place of sexual liberality” (Jackson 2011) and a modern “gay paradise” (Kang 2010). Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bangkok, this paper highlights the ways in which queer subjects are conducting their own experiments with these drugs and their sexuality to produce their own forms of knowledge, care, and corporeality that exist in tense, yet inseparable, relation to these infrastructures. Through an examination of these queer experiments and the ways in which the drug escapes the clinical infrastructures that seek to procure and regiment it, I argue that the drug itself gets queered as its chemical composition is repurposed in the creation of new forms of intimate relation.

Author

• Tim Quinn, Rice University, Department of Anthropology