The Undetectable Crisis: Changing Technologies of Risk

Abstract

This article explores how medical technologies used to monitor and treat HIV/AIDS have affected the bodies, selves and sexual identities of gay men. In the wake of antibody and viral load testing, HIV-positive individuals have become responsibilized in an historically unique way, one that yields the virus up as an object of specific and individuated management. This provides conditions for the castigation of HIV-positive sexual actors. Yet, by positing a homogenous gay experience, some accounts of `post-crisis' have the effect of bracketing the intensification of responsibility at this site. I suggest that the optic of genealogy may help render current needs in the epidemic `detectable', by drawing attention to the changing ways in which medical technologies produce socio-sexual subjects in terms of risk.