ABSTRACT
This chapter draws our attention to how molecular HIV surveillance emerges in the HIV scientific literature and public media discourse and how this technology, while professing to be uniquely positioned to be an integral part of the push toward ending AIDS, nevertheless also poses and possesses inherently problematic issues. The goal is to critically engage with how molecular HIV surveillance, a practice and technology that is portrayed as a benign public health intervention, evacuates and purifies many of the social and political contexts of HIV transmissions. The chapter also extends this work by focusing on how molecular HIV surveillance through genotypic and phenotypic testing can be read as forms of ‘molecular truth-telling’ surveillance devices. This has implications not only for the ethics of consent, anonymity and criminalization, which has been documented in the literature, but also for how molecular surveillance might come to discern, through genetic surveillance of HIV, people's alleged sexuality, position in so-called ‘HIV risk networks’ (as well as creating new risk groups), who in turn might be subject to ‘enhanced HIV surveillance and interventions’.
