As a presenter, I will present the paper Resisting Subjectivation Practices: “safe sex” as a Regime of Truth and “bug chasing” as Counter-Conduct in the Context of HIV, in which I argue that the imperative of “safe sex” constitutes a biopolitical dispositif of the governance of sexuality. In Foucauldian terms, it is inscribed within a hygienist governmentality that not only represses but also conducts individuals’ lives by regulating their risks and intimate practices. Although it presents itself as neutral and purely sanitary, ostensibly aimed at protecting individual and public health by promoting responsible sexual practices, a critical Foucauldian analysis reveals that it also normalises a model of acceptable and “safe” sexuality, displaces or pathologises other expressions of desire, reinforces the medicalisation of sexuality by positioning biomedical knowledge as the sole legitimate arbiter of sexual behaviour, and functions as a regulatory apparatus for populations by managing sexual practices in terms of statistics, risk, and epidemiological control. Lastly, but no less importantly, it operates as a mechanism for the moralisation of pleasure, whereby enjoyment is subordinated to safety and care criteria defined by biomedicine rather than by the subjects themselves.
Therefore, although it would be labelled as negligent conduct, ‘’bug chasing’’ represents a stance that confronts a specific normative regime and inverts it by identifying “safe sex” as a governance dispositif whose mission is to direct sexual behaviours, subverting the hygienist logic through the intentional pursuit of what the dispositif aims to prevent (infection), and reappropriating and resignifying risk, whether as an erotic element, a marker of community identity, or a form of symbolic resistance, thus generating a field of alternative practices and discourses.