Budgets and biologicals: The bio-economization of HIV governance

Abstract

Changing global responses to HIV/AIDS entail shifting biological loci of surveillance which are believed to constitute HIV risk. Meanwhile, various local institutions and organizations are mobilized to play a key role in HIV service delivery and surveillance. Drawing on a socio-material approach to the body and the economy, this study theorizes the emergence of three ‘HIV service bio-economies’ devised to provide HIV services while controlling HIV transmission in Taiwan. Instead of presuming a divide between the social and the biological, it analyzes how different bodies are produced through differing modes of HIV surveillance and economization, buttressed by global health sciences, state budgets and quantitative metrics. The analysis of multiple ontologies of HIV underscores the political nature of risk-framing in a transnational context, but also how certain bodies incapable of being enrolled in these economies could be further marginalized – a process which might be understood as an ontological politics of HIV.