ABSTRACT
This chapter revolves around the discussion of how HIV preventive medication, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, has spurred debates on access to healthcare services and treatment. Kristensen argues that, adding to the already stigmatised contests around the classed, racialised, gendered, and sexualised ‘nature’ of HIV/AIDS, the (non-)access to such preventive medication has also triggered questions on the temporality of disease. For Kristensen, many of the theatrical, cinematic, or literary representations of the HIV/AIDS debates tend to portray the disease as a thing of the past. However, as seen in Bryan Washington’s short story “Waugh” (2019), the sense of temporality evoked by HIV/AIDS narratives may not always fall into such categorisation. This means that not every narrative functions as a process of memorialisation, but, as is the case with “Waugh,” they may induce new dialogues between a medical-humanities and a posthumanities perspective. The author’s discussion of the short story, by especially focusing on the characters of Rod and Poke and highlighting the uncertainties about when the disease will develop, pinpoints how group dynamics may change in line with prophylactic thinking and how being tested positive or negative affects not only the conceptualisation of the disease but also the group member’s perception of one another. Underlining the gendering, racialising, and othering processes that accompany the contraction of the virus, Kristensen’s analysis of “Waugh” reveals intriguing posthuman predicaments, where “moralistic assumptions,” in the author’s words, “undergird a psychosocial repression of the epidemic.”
