The birth of the HIV-positive subject: power-knowledge, ethics and safer sex according to Michel Foucault’s perspective

  • Post category:In Progress

I propose to explore how and to what extent HIV infection and AIDS are significant factors in the constitution of subjectivity for infected individuals. In other words, how subjectivity is constituted under the condition of a stigmatized and discredited terminal illness in the social sphere. This leads me to think about how types or practices that involve the existence and development of true discourses about seropositivity and safe sex are formed, and how our relationship with ourselves is structured by these true discourses and the effects they produce or the obligations they impose. Therefore, Michel Foucault’s latest research works, as one would expect, are pertinent, since this research focuses on how HIV subjectivities as an experience of oneself and others are constituted through obligations of truth, through the bonds of what Foucault called veridiction. The goal is to investigate the historical conditions of possibility that contributed to shaping the safer sex discourse and, on the other hand, to trace the emergence of the seropositive subject.