Queering the Toolkit: Sexual Health in the Era of PrEP, DoxyPEP, and U=U.
In this dissertation, I examine how the biomedicalization of sexual health, particularly through interventions like PrEP and ARTs (to prevent HIV transmission) and DoxyPEP (to prevent bacterial STIs), is reshaping both provider-patient relationships and broader cultural understandings of risk, pleasure, and care within GBTQ+ communities. To do so, I draw on interviews with primary care and sexual care-focused medical providers and GBTQ+ community members in the San Francisco Metro Area. Biomedicalization is a multi-layered social process that captures the rapid transformation of medical knowledge, technologies, and practices, with particular attention to the dynamics of power and structural inequality. It is especially useful for understanding the intersection of culture, power, and health practices in contemporary contexts. In my interviews, I find that providers and patients navigate complex ideas of risk, classification, and cultural meanings of sex and sexual health, centering the existence and use of biomedical tools in their decision-making and meaning-making processes. I also find that biomedicalization within this arena is made more dynamic by how it interacts with queer ways of knowing and queer embodigments of sexual agency.
#emancipatorysciences
#ThesisThursday
Ryan DeCarsky
(He/Him)
This week we wanted to highlight a Doctoral Candidate from the University of Washington doing research in Queering and sexual health! #emancipatorysciences #ThesisThursday
