ABSTRACT
This chapter considers recent developments in two of the major institutions that organize our responses to HIV/AIDS, the criminal law and randomized controlled trials. It discusses how the criminal law frames responsibility for HIV transmission. The chapter examines the capacity of legal discourse to distribute responsibility for HIV effects beyond the actions of HIV-positive individuals, and to take into account the operation of extended networks of human and nonhuman actors in materialization of HIV events. It discusses case of Primary Health Care – in which a specific configuration and enactment of medical services was found to play a part in a case of sexual transmission of HIV. The chapter brings reframing of responsibility into articulation with questions of biomedical prevention, which see a range of biomedical devices and procedures invested with some potential for HIV prevention. It attempts to intervene in processes through which certain human subjects are made exclusively responsible for unaccounted effects of biomedical interventions.
