Short abstract:

Can we think of the city as a chemical affair; as a passionate attachment and a public matter mediated by chemistry? Operating across affectivity, materiality, and sociality, the chemical affair brings to the fore Berlin as it is approached through and infrastructured by chemicals.

Long abstract:

Can we think of the city as a chemical affair – as a passionate attachment and a public matter mediated by chemistry? Attraction, repulsion, fusion, and dissolution might characterize this affair as it engenders transformative relations – from gradual corrosion and galvanizing refinements to spontaneous explosions. This paper is part of an ethnography on PrEP (Pre-Exposure-Prophylaxis), a drug to effectively prevent an HIV infection. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork within sexual cultures and the HIV prevention landscape of Berlin; the city that harbors the majority of (mostly gay male) PrEP users in Germany and that is emblematic of sexual permissiveness in the public imaginary. Through the lens of chemistry, I ask for the relationship between the pharmaceutical, its users, and the city. Operating across affectivity, materiality, and sociality, the chemical affair brings to the fore Berlin as it is approached through and infrastructured by chemicals. Chemistry serves as a metaphor to capture PrEP users’ relationship to the city, characterized by ambivalent feelings, by an ‘appalling appeal’. It also foregrounds the role of chemical agents, particularly antiretroviral drugs and illicit substances, to forge a sense of subcultural belonging and to experiment with bodily pleasures. I thus explore how the city variously inscribes itself into bodies through the chemical agent PrEP and how a specific notion of queer urbanity is constantly re-produced in chemically mediated body practices.