The moral (bio)politics of the abnormal: Situating a Southwest China border town in global AIDS governance

Abstract

This paper analyses the interaction of two models in the social process of global AIDS governance and explores the possibilities of innovation in the social response to risk. The two moral regimes by which to cope with problematized situations in the contemporary world are conceptualized as the “center” and the “border”. The center promotes a normative discourse in the name of defending society, reifying order and pursuing cost-effectiveness in operations. The border undertakes exploratory social action guided by a specific idea of “goodness”. While the two approaches engage in continuous battles, with integration and penetration between them, in the case of people living with HIV worldwide, they were first degraded into a separated biomedical pariah population, and then were brought under the strict medical regime of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART). This shift between abject exclusion and exceptional inclusion indicates the meta-structure of life governance in the contemporary world. China's border cities are key outposts of global AIDS governance that reflect how the institutional deployment of exclusion and inclusion extends from global to local. The “ zuo aizibing” (doing AIDS projects) in Biancheng, a Southwest China border town, embody typically as well as uniquely the complicated “center–border” entanglement. Border-organized “infected peer groups” are embedded in the local official governance system, manifesting as “front-line foot soldiers” serving the center by facilitating a smoother integration of the city's HIV-positive population into the public health monitoring system, where they are disciplined to become docile medical subjects. However, such groups, in adaptable symbiosis with this normative deployment, have also been able to independently open up entirely new fields of social action, allowing a humanitarian vision to be mediated, “translated”, and implemented. Through the transmission of knowledge, affection, and vitality, such groups have freed their HIV-positive peers, otherwise abandoned by the normative logic of AIDS governance, from stigmatization and from being limited by disease and treatment, to start pursuing new forms of life. As a global social experiment, the border, as revealed by AIDS, has far-reaching implications for exploring the inclusive and open potential of society itself.