Sexual Worldings
Sexual Worldings
This talk considers ways in which global health rubrics employed for the creation of evidence about sexual subjects in international HIV prevention research and programming may comprise an affective component of ‘sexual worldings.’ By this I mean to evoke a recursive, connected relationship between data production about sexualities and everyday sexual experiencing. I explore such actions as indicative of ways in which (queer) life-worlds may be typified by concealment even at the point at which they might be bound up in knowledge making activities. I connect such perspectives to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as bearing qualities that are hidden. I explore such ideas in reference to life-contexts in and around HIV prevention community-projects in India as an example. In doing so I consider how terms such as ‘MSM’ (and other public health designations) might ‘think’ their subjects – as categories in varied orientations toward sexual being-in-the-world.
Paul Boyce (University of Sussex)
Paul Boyce is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. His forthcoming edited book is entitled « Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern' » He is currently preparing a monograph entitled « Sexualities, HIV and Ethnography: Sexual Worldings and Queer Misrecognitions in India ».