IMAGINING A FUTURE WITH HIV? HUMAN-TECHNOLOGICAL-MICROBIAL HI(STORIES) IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY HIV MEDICINE

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices, January 23-25 2019,

Linnaeus University, Vaxjo, Sweden.

HIV infection is often taken as negative in Public Health, motivating action within a paradigm of elimination which takes the extermination of the virus to be a self-evident goal. Narratives of HIV as a scourge, crisis, and disaster have been instrumental in mobilising resources in the ‘global battle’ to eliminate HIV, but these (hi)stories also tell and enact a future where HIV is imagined to be non-existent. But how might imagining a future with HIV be done, and what might this look like? Given recent technological advances in the form of antiretroviral therapy (ART) which has rendered HIV infection into a chronic disease that attacks life, but does not necessarily kill it, is it now possible to relate to HIV in a way that goes beyond a paradigm of elimination and consequently, to think of HIV in terms of interspecies familiarity, rather than alterity? If technology is so intimately entangled in how human and microbial lives must and do intersect, what sort of multispecies stories about human-technology-microbe might our use of HIV-related medicine tell? Drawing on my research with men who have sex with men (MSM) in London, this paper is an attempt to think with their life experiences, such that other possible stories of ‘living with’ HIV might be told. Pursuing the idea that practices of HIV related medicine which do not aim directly at the absence of disease or even the avoidance of death are crucial to novel human-technological-microbial configurations, this paper is both a speculative foray into symbiopolitics and an attempt to enact a world which might be different, but is not.