ABSTRACT
The following chapter focuses on two issues of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) scale-up and its role in the alleged ‘end of AIDS’ narrative. First, the chapter gives an account of PrEP as controversy, that is, to highlight how this intimate drug became a public object subjected to immense media and political focus, spurring on a heated debate about its use and place within HIV prevention. In this analysis, I dedicate some space to analyzing what has been called ‘the Truvada Wars’, i.e., the controversies that arose in the US and the UK. The chapter uses ‘PrEP as controversy’ as a way of illuminating the signifying practices that inform the discourse around PrEP and, in particular, the stigmas of HIV, gay male sexuality and its entanglements with issues of austerity and neoliberalism. In the end, this chapter highlights the public life of an intimate drug, the controversies that it has produced and the many paradoxical fashions in which the freedom it accords also is bound to medicalized power. While PrEP’s role in ensuring the end of AIDS is yet to be written, what can be said at this historical moment is something about the signifying effects it has currently produced as well as the public life of an intimate drug.
