Paper short abstract:

Following Donna Haraway's invitation to 'stay with the trouble,' this paper takes up the question of what HIV prevention and treatment might look like if we take a step away from the language of elimination and eradication to imagine a less hostile encounter between species, human and viral.

Paper long abstract:

How might humans as a species make peace with and live with HIV and other viruses? What do we miss when we only 'fight' HIV, categorizing it as enemy and other? Drawing on feminist science studies' recent articulations regarding interspecies entanglements on planet Earth, this paper attempts to think with HIV: what kind of 'companion species' is it; how does it gets inscribed in human bodies; and how humanity has inscribed the virus over thirty plus years of living together? This odd companion, HIV, doesn't die once it is in us; it lives as long as we do, depending on us to host it; we keep it at bay, while also keeping it alive (by keeping ourselves, its host, alive), attending to nutrition, exercise and medicines. Similar to the way it can hide in our bodies, it hides from plain site, multiplying and thriving for many long years beyond the social gaze. And what are the advantages to co-habitation with this virus? What does it produce for humanity besides suffering and death? Among other things, it produces new forms of biosociality for the infected and affected, and interveners and researchers like us. It also increases the biovalue of particular populations, places and institutions, in addition to discourses of tolerance, human and patient rights. Moving from a framing of epidemic to one of endemic, is it possible to imagine a future in which we learn to 'live together' with HIV, a future where alterity is transformed into familiarity?