Dispositivo da prevenção combinada do hiv: do corpo perverso ao corpo combinado

Abstract

This research had as its object of discursive study the combined prevention of hiv in Brazil. I hypothesized what I called the hiv combined prevention apparatus, investigating how its statements reconfigure the government of life and update subjects, transitioning between the so-called perverse and chronic bodies to arrive at the figure of the combined body. The investigation adopts an archeo-genealogical perspective based on Michel Foucault. I inquired into the documents in the order of documents-monuments, divided into a historical-documentary segment (historical texts and governmental milestones) and a media segment (advertising campaigns broadcast between 1988 and 2015). From excerpts extracted from these documents-monuments, I described the discursive regularities, the displacements, and the historical conditions of emergence of combined prevention, and I problematized the power relations and the fabrication of subjects in each period of the aids epidemic in Brazil. In addition to Foucaultian archeo-genealogy, I mobilized concepts such as analytics of power, apparatus, biopolitics, regimes of truth, and governmentality. The study dialogues closely with authors such as Néstor Perlongher and the aids apparatus, Atilio Butturi Junior and Camila Lara and the chronic aids apparatus, Paul Preciado and his reading of pharmacopornographic biopolitics, and Richard Parker with the description of social responses and the advancement of the epidemic in the country. The analysis demonstrated how government strategies have transformed over the years that the epidemic has affected the Brazilian territory. The initial aids apparatus operated through the normalization of fear and dangerousness, fabricating the idea of the perverse body focused on risk groups. Over time and with the advancement of antiretroviral therapies (ARTs), this mechanism was updated to a chronic apparatus, shifting the focus from the fear of death to the biomedical management of life. This chronicity paved the way for the emergence of what I called the combined prevention apparatus, guided by the accentuated biomedicalization of treatment through technologies such as PrEP, PEP, and Treatment as Prevention (TasP). I conclude that the combined prevention apparatus functions as a pharmacopornographic biopolitics that establishes a new way of governing life. In this apparatus, the combined body is fabricated: a subject who is not primarily governed by interdiction, but who is summoned, under a neoliberal rationality, to become the manager of themselves. Health is converted into a moral command of self-surveillance and consumption. In light of this, I defend the importance of denaturalizing contemporary biomedicalization, subverting the norm so that the combined body ceases to be an individualistic biological machine and begins to articulate, through a liberating education, an alliance of community and political resistance.