Abstract
Unpacking cultural and political understandings of Truvada—a little blue pill that serves as the first chemical Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, and considering the sexual politics it has been enacting since its approval, this essay contains a close reading of the solo performance Blue Is, Blue Does. With the aim of denaturalising positivistic grand narratives in epidemiology and public health that disregard Truvada’s contested status, the performance explores a variety of stories that are told when the blue pill—as a performative agent—is leading the narrative, including: world-making capacities of the feeling of blue enacted by AIDS-related atrocities, restricted access to PrEP due to systemic inequalities, renewed sexual ecstasies, the formation of Truvada-mediated subjectivities and the medicalisation of the homosexual body.
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Notes
- 1.
I use Truvada and PrEP interchangeably. Truvada is a medication manufactured by the Californian pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences that functions as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP). Whereas Truvada is the name of the pill, PrEP is a regimen that, along with the daily intake of Truvada, includes regular doctor visits and sexually transmitted infection (STI) screenings.
- 2.
Cultural critique from the epidemic years was focused on challenging institutionalised responses to the epidemic. The art was focused on decoding and dismantling responses that related the genesis of HIV and AIDS to gay men’s promiscuity (Crimp and Bersani 1988; Crimp and Rolston 1990; Katz and Hushka 2015; Román 1998). Artists, such as Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, also intervened into predominantly white presentations of the crisis by pointing at the issues of race, racism, classism and homophobia in the experience of the disease (Cohen 1999: 93–94).
- 3.
The essay is informed by gender and sexuality studies scholar Judith Butler’s work on discursive performativity, expanded by feminist and performance scholar Karen Barad’s and queer and trans studies scholar Paul B. Preciado’s theories focusing on the performativity of inanimate material entities. Butler (1993) theorised one’s sense of self as a performative effect of the stylistic repetition of the compulsory discursive conventions that play a role in the material production of bodies. With the aim of destabilising discursive structures, Barad expresses dissatisfaction with turning materiality into a matter of language and cultural representations and asserts that language has been granted too much power (2003: 801). She proposes a notion of posthumanist performativity—a materialist re-working of discursive performativity that focuses on the material effects of inanimate matter (2003: 808). Similarly, when focusing on chemical pharmaceutical substances, such as testosterone or the Pill, Preciado claims these chemical substances play a part in the process of a material bodily production and one’s social intelligibility (2013: 34).
- 4.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Finley paid tribute to friends lost to AIDS via numerous public artworks of mourning, including a traveling installation Memento Mori. The installation had various iterations, including Written in Sand, Ribbon Gate and Vacant Chair. In addition, Finley’s poem ‘The Black Sheep,’ written from the perspective of a queer outcast, was in 1990 inscribed in bronze and set into a stone in New York City’s East Village.
- 5.
As history and sexuality studies scholar Lisa Duggan asserts, neoliberalism is a system that organises and constructs a collective life by promoting equality, which serves as a strategy to hide ‘stark inequalities of wealth and power and of class, race, gender, and sexuality across nation-states as well as within them’ (2003: 5). Behind the curtains, this system exploits the language of social justice and operates on neocolonialist and neoracist principles, creating a homogenous citizenship that rests on the values of whiteness and masculinity.
- 6.
As Puar argues, these privileging conditions that are characteristic for national gay normativity (homonationalism) operate ‘upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity , and bodily integrity’ (2007: xii). Subjects complicit in perpetuating state violence in support of homeland security and nationalist values are in return granted freedom to consume goods, services and relationships. Such freedom is always already racialized and tethered to ‘violence’—as critical race theory and sexuality studies scholar Chandan Reddy (2011) would have it—entangling US gay subjects within a state power apparatus that disciplines, regulates, and polices them, and uses them as conduits for neoliberal governmentality and imperialism.
- 7.
The idea follows English and queer studies scholar Michael Warner’s argument that, considering sex, ‘[e]very new wave of queer youth picks up something from its predecessors but also invents itself from scratch’ (1999: 51–52).
- 8.
Race approaches these behaviours as a culture characterised by ‘a cluster of activities and practices that are meaningful for participants with their own organizing logics and relative coherence; a significant source of pleasure, connection, eroticism and intimacy’ (2015: 256).
- 9.
As Foucault (1978) asserts, towards the end of the nineteenth century juridical and medical institutions started governing and policing the population by using sex as an object that controls and reproduces life. Inappropriate sexual behaviour was criminalised, pathologised and made a subject of correction. However, as he argues, a counter-effect of such governance was the multiplication of sexual identities and, thereafter, identity politics and movements.
- 10.
Although I observe the term medicalisation via the lens of Foucauldian power formulation (disciplines and regulations), I also account for transformations of the term as influenced by consumerised medicine, care and pharmaceutical use. Accordingly, it must be considered that Truvada is also accessed through community-based clinics and taken up in ways that defy, exceed or approximate normative medical instruction, pointing towards medicine’s multiplicity and difference. I would like to thank Kane Race for bringing this to my attention.
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Bujan, I. (2018). Blue Is, Blue Does: A Performance about Truvada in Several Interactions. In: Campbell, A., Gindt, D. (eds) Viral Dramaturgies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70317-6_14
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