If you aren’t married yet, you’ll be married to your treatment from now on’

Embodied mediations in a women’s HIV peer advisory project in Mexico

Bibliographic Data

ID15099347
AuthorsAna Amuchástegui Herrera (Departmento de Educación y Comunicación, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City, Mexico, corresponding author), Azucena Ojeda Sánchez (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico)
Year2022
Volume24
Issue3
Pages406-420
Publication date2022-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCulture Health & Sexuality (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-1058 • E-ISSN: 1464-5351
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13691058.2020.1852312
PMID33393881
OpenAlexW3119089359
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Treatment as Prevention is a key biopolitical intervention on the HIV epidemic but relies on individual adherence to antiretroviral treatment in order to have an effect on the population as a whole. Informed by a discussion of biopower, this paper analyses the complex relationships between discourses of competent authorities and modes of subjectification through a qualitative analysis of findings from 5 years of fieldwork associated with the action-research project Yantzin: Women HIV Peer Advisors in Mexico. It looks at the production of subjects of adherence, whereby peer advisors emerge as key agents at the interface between scientific and experiential knowledge. Contradictorily, the desire to live becomes feasible only by engaging with these biopolitical interventions. We discuss how peer advisors twist these technologies in such a way that they provide not only operations of power but also courses of action for desire. Through embodied mediation strategies that critique obedience to medical prescription and translate scientific information into bodily and emotionally shared experiences, peer advisors' work goes beyond the behavioural rationality of biomedical models offering embodied proof for other women that, even when living with HIV, a project of happiness is possible

Biopower · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Political science · Population · Public relations · Sociology · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk · HIV/AIDS Research and Interventions · Law · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Social Psychology