Post-AIDS imaginaries: configuring speculative futures in the cultures of HIV intervention

Abstract

‘Post-AIDS Imaginaries: Configuring Speculative Futures in the Cultures of HIV Intervention’ addresses the transformation of HIV intervention imaginaries in contemporary queer AIDS media. I focus on three visual case studies where artists, film directors, and public health promoters’ experiment with images of AIDS pasts and presents to conceptualise and produce images of post-AIDS futures. I employ an interdisciplinary textual-speculative method, which draws on previous science and technology studies (STS) and queer cultural studies scholarship. This method allows me to articulate how post-AIDS futures are constituted by the entanglement of imagined social conditions and public health promotion strategies. My aim is to show how the meaning of health promotion and disease prevention is reconfigured within queer AIDS media to create new meanings about HIV intervention for the future. A critical post-AIDS analysis, I argue, can help researchers to rethink the terms and conditions of AIDS history and to create a critical relationship between the perceived past and desired futures. In previous scholarship, post-AIDS futures have been theorised as deterministic endpoints that gloss the social and cultural dimensions of the global AIDS pandemic. My research challenges this longstanding assertion and suggests that a critical theory of ‘post-AIDS imaginaries’ can more effectively account for transformations of technological progress within queer sexual cultures imagined futures with and beyond HIV transmission.