Short abstract:

PrEP, a drug that effectively prevents an HIV infection, was introduced to the German healthcare system in 2019. Employing the notion of “queer chemistry”, this paper asks which material-affective relations the pharmaceutical affords between queer bodies, sexual pleasures, and the city of Berlin.

Long abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research, conducted within sexual cultures and the HIV prevention landscape of Berlin. It follows the affective and material capacities of PrEP (Pre-Exposure-Prophylaxis), a drug to effectively prevent an HIV infection that has been covered by German statutory health insurance since September of 2019. Since its introduction, the HIV prophylaxis has resurfaced discourses around (ir-)responsibility, safer sex practices, and sexual health. Berlin – as it harbors the majority of (mostly gay male) PrEP users in Germany and as it occupies a space of sexual permissiveness in the public imaginary – has become emblematic for these shifts. Employing the notion of “queer chemistry” (Race 2018), I ask which material-affective relations the pharmaceutical affords between queer bodies, sexual pleasures, and the city of Berlin. I 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. Thus, rather than a finished state or fixed location, I approach urban belonging as an instable residue of the interaction between specific localities in Berlin, bodily intimacies, and chemical agents such as PrEP.