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The War on Sex: Some Notes

 




The War on Sex


Sex is an important site of social control, adjudication, and- ultimately -oppression.

Many social movement organizations have focused on sexual health and do not generally frame their work in terms of social justice or civil rights.

The failed attempts to decriminalize HIV in the Virginia legislature, both within and outside the General Assembly, are both troubling and deserving of critical examination, and yet they are just pieces of a much larger puzzle comprising legal, social, and economic systems that do not readily seem to fit together.

Institutional ethnography: Interrelationships among the General Assembly, Virginia Department of Health, and community organizations working to repeal the laws criminalizing HIV in the Commonwealth are each a subject of analysis here…

The Problems of Prospective: “Thinking Sex”

                From the beginning, this issue was not seen for what it truly was and is: a war on sex.

                By only problematizing HIV, the movement for decriminalization missed opportunities for determining causality between the effects of such laws and their impact on the wider whole of society. They failed to consider the true function of specific language encoded in each law, which I unsuccessfully attempted to do on occasion when the opportunity arose; and this ultimately resulted in the failure to decriminalize, with the felony repeal reinstated in the final moments of the movement.

The historiography of the legislature, and of society for context, was used to describe the origin off these laws as a function of HIV-related stigma and fears left over from the early days of the global pandemic; a perspective, which, pigeonholed their multipurpose design and the movement for HIV decriminalization in the process.

Hepatitis – control, prisons, and punishment

 Misrepresenting the intentionality

It was never about HIV. It was about control. The world is waging a war on sex, and the issue of HIV/AIDS- having claimed millions of lives- created new fears about sex, adding fuel to long-standing public debates over sexual morality.

(at the same time, social movements are driven by pharmaceutical industry and the technological advancements for surveillance are leading an alternative

Social movement organizations such Positive Women’s Network and Equality Virginia frame their work in terms of social justice or civil rights, never analyzing and politicizing sex it its own terms- both within and outside of their analysis of sexuality and gender; and marks a turn away from the interdisciplinarity of historical movements like ACT Up, which have typically focused on sexual health. A dichotomy that prefers itself driving division and interpretive specialization and leaves modern messaging about sex to the whims of power in the prevailing paradigm; the structure/agency of which is a blueprint for changing behavior.

Now at the intersection of culture, health, and sexuality there appears to be only one way to turn

Modern movements are driven by pharmaceutical industry and the technologies of state surveillance which monitor them.

Freedom is given only within the strictest of constraints.

The meaning and materiality of modern messaging in movements of sex and desire, such as the campaign for “healthy sexuals” managed by Gilead Sciences, is painfully difficult to contest; as it relies on mainstream consensus- if not exactly in its favor, at least in support of the general principles in whose name it fought.

This has had grave consequences for the autonomy and agency of women, young people, the disadvantaged, and the vulnerable. It has ruined many, many lives. It has a particularly violent impact on those who are socially marginalized, socially stigmatized, or racially marked, or who cherish nonstandard sexual practices. Sexual freedom has lost significant ground to it- ground that will take a very long time to recover.

Costly for some, the war on sex has turned out to be immensely profitable and useful for others- not only for politicians and academics, therapist and police officers, journalist, and moral leaders, but also for a multitude of interested parties.

And, as in most wars, fog and shadows, propaganda and disinformation conceal the contours of events. So, we need to understand what is going on in order to confront it and challenge it. And we need to do that now.

Without a coherent analysis of sex and its relationship to social justice to make sense of how sex is mobilized legally, politically, and socially, it becomes impossible to think critically about these cases- and the countless others like them- as a whole.

The world is waging a war on sex and science.

In the context of SB1138

                There is nothing wrong with using legal and moral pressure to reduce the incidence of sexual assault. However, the war on sex cannot be reduced to an enlightened effort to prevent and punish sexual harm, though it often camouflages itself as such. It is a war against sex itself- in many cases, against sex that does no harm but that arouses disapproval on moral, aesthetic, political or religious grounds. Those grounds provide an acceptable and politically palatable cover for a war on the kinds of sex that are disreputable or that many people already happen to dislike.

In determining the function and intentionality of Infected Sexual Battery, let me be very clear on this point. There is no denying that sex can be a vehicle for harm, sometimes very serious harm. It is not only legitimate but indeed imperative to stop people from using sex to harm one another. Sexual freedom is not a license to abuse others and abscond personal responsibility. But preventing sexual battery should not furnish a pretext for an all-out war on sex that permanently identifies sex itself with danger and with potential or actual harm. Nor should it provide a justification for dispensing with all measure and proportion in deterrence and punishment.

The view that sex in itself is bas or harmful is rarely articulated or argued. But it is powerfully if wordlessly expressed in the tendency to punish sexual crimes much more harshly than other serious crimes, even the most destructive and violent crimes. Under that cover, and in the guide of a campaign for “healthy sexuals,” as it is described by Gilead Sciences, the war on sex offers a noble cause and an effective rally point for people located on every part of the political spectrum.

This was made most evident in the ending moments of the movement for HIV decriminalization in the specific context of repeal for infected sexual battery at General Assembly. It unites feminist1 and evangelicals,2 liberals3 and radicals4, politicians5 and activists6, intellectuals7 and populists8, Left and Right. That is what makes it so hard to critique and to challenge. But that is also what makes it so important to address.

The purpose of this report is to document, to describe, and to oppose the war on sex.

How is it possible, in the context of such broad and far-reaching progressive reforms, to speak of a war on sex?

This report does not ignore or attempt to play down these transformative changes; nor does it aim to demean those working on the issue and analysis. At the same time, it is possible, in the context of such board and far-reaching reforms on sexual health and surveillance to end the HIV epidemic, to speak of a war on sex/identity itself. The progressive liberalization of sex in the U.S., and in Virginia as it Victorian colonial antecedent, is not the whole story. And that is the point, to consider analytic alterity in comparing strategical plans for policy analysis and advocacy around issues of HIV criminalization, from which a juxtaposition is used to measure the meaning and materiality of their difference- that is, real cultural difference and contextuality interpolating the issues of criminalization, modernization, and repeal.

Think about it in triplicate: There was no debate over repealing penal codes punishing HIV positive volunteers from donating blood and minimal discourse on the presence of bodily fluids as justification for mandating diagnostic HIV and STI screenings; although in deliberation, forced medicalization for commissioning a crime in the presence of bodily fluids was centered around the authority of the sheriffs office to oversee the bodily autonomy and agency of inmates affected by HIV and viral hepatitis- an issue I am going to address again at another point in this analysis. For two out of three references in the Code proposed in repeal, there was never an epidemiologic argument made in support of either law. Instead, concerns over shifting controls over HIV positive persons for its interpretive status as a representation of sex outside the boundaries of moral political privilege.  That is, the idea of gay sex and the idea of Black sex are unacceptable and therefore must be prevented and punished.

So long as the felony remains as law, infected sexual battery no less a source of stigma than before it was amended to the current form; which is arguably an even greater threat to public health, culture and sexuality as a open-ended penal prophylactic- the implications of which have as yet to be explained.

The felony reinstatement by the most progressive body in the Assembly, as previously stated, were the individuals going out of their way to wage war against the repeal, continuing a cultural crackdown on sex. This mounting tendency to treat sex itself as a danger or threat is part of the domain problematizing sex and an overall intensifying urgency to protect people from sex; which leads to increasing regulations and criminalization of sex; and the imposition of ever-narrowing legal and administrative definitions of who is entitles to engage in sex.**another issue I attended to in the course of this work that I identified as problematic on the grounds of interpretive violence risked in taxonomizing transmission practices along the lines of identity categorization.

The expansion of the populations whose sexual behavior falls under state or bureaucratic control is also a part of this project as an issue immediately, and intentionally? ignored in all initial planning processes within and outside the institutional debate. Since there is no known example of surveillance technologies being used to prosecute individuals with HIV under any of the codes in question, its potentialities were pushed aside as powerless in distilling stigma in law. That was a mistake.

A striking urgency to keep the felony or kill the bill is evidence of the disproportional severity of punishments meted out to those who commit sex offenses, even those for whom there is no contest are subject to misdemeanor convictions which share a proportional penal power with the same source of stigma as the felony.

In short, the familiar stores we have been telling ourselves about the sexual revolution, the rise of sexual permissiveness, the collapse of traditional sexual morality, the change in sexual attitudes, the progress of women’s rights and gay rights, the decriminalization of sodomy, and the legalization of gay marriage have all diverted attention from a less familiar but equally important story about a new war on sex, a war that in recent years has intensified in scope and cruelty. One aim of this project, then, is to tell at least some parts of that neglected story- and document the increasing restriction and regulation of sex in an era otherwise characterized by sexual liberalization.

The proliferating restrictions placed on sex in recent decades should not be seen as mere bumps on the road to greater sexual tolerance or the last gaps of Victorian prohibitions (as represented in the origins of this idea in a colonial context of Virginia )residual formations or dwindling pockets of reaction destined to be swept away by the rising tide of progress and sexual liberation On the contrary many of these phenomena represent emergent formations:  new development that point to urgent problems of justice . They demand to be addressed. They call in particular for a reconsideration not just of specific tactics but also a broad political strategies on the part of feminists LGBTQ activist another progressive forces ... For sexual freedom is a fundamental an essential freedom and oddly enough the alternate protector of human privacy vulnerability and autonomy . Moreover since the criminalizing of sex is entwined with racism sexism social inequality and homophobia though as I shall explain it is also distinct and independent from them it demands a coalitional response that can bring together a range of social movements. All of these developments point to the need for a fresh historical vision of how we got into our present situation and for an enhanced understanding of the embattled terrain on which we find ourselves now in the context of sexual battery and the reinstatement of a felony repeal this must begin with the complete deconstruction of the domains we see as normal and pre discursive and development of policy planning efforts and strategies Q describe the impact and surmise the effects of health related legislation on individuals affected by the topicality being questioned and at the same time must include clear concise platform for principled policy program evaluation that assassins the degree to which actors involved in the advocacy an analytic processes are understood in the context of their capacity to shape the legislation itself and in this way we can monitor what ideas and ideals and whose perspectives and perceptions R penetrating the policy pantheathat in sum is what this paper and project aims to provide to call attention to the war on facts science and identity which is to say the interpretive violence inactive by structures and agencies operating within the cultural domain I have laid out . The manifold ways in which sexual freedom and sexual expression have in recent years come under attack from both government and civil society. Stakeholders need to trace the history of how progressive political movements came to abandon the calls of human rights pertaining to sex which was made evident in Virginia with the absence of support from the Commonwealth leading LGBTQ and aids service organizations whom have historically been involved in processes related to HIV criminalization and yet despite their continued policy work the shift is now on trans gender identity and the topicality of trans life rather than an empowerment effort for ending the epidemic from which these groups emerged . We also must examine how kinds of sexual conduct as well as kinds of sexually defined individuals are currently being hemmed in by new sorts of formal regulation social disqualification policing hyper criminalization and administrative management and a period of otherwise expanding sexual Liberty this is what I call a neoliberal penalty which I understand as something quite precise as a term used to describe a specific form of rationality in which the penal sphere is pushed outside the political economy and medical legal context and serves the function of a boundary Sue generes that is the penal section is marked off from the dominant logic of classical economics as the only states where order is legitimately enforced by the state to explain as the state retreats from regulation of the market They can legitimately act that is the proper sphere of governing so while this project does not discuss in detail the role of molecular HIV surveillance and new technologies for interceding the epidemics that issue is nonetheless integrally apart of this and the wider sexual struggle I have surmised so in the case of saxe this neoliberal penalty has can duced cue an intensification of criminal and regulatory social control, evidenced by the felony reinstatementin the medical legal context, and other programs affecting even widening spheres of human behavior such as the widespread surveillance of HIV negative individuals for pre exposure prophylaxis viral load monitoring medical care markers another interpellations of identity associated with sex as astrategy for categorisation and a taxonomy of social control. Another critical issue that needs to be made clear for future work in this area is that there is a meaningless distinction and the lived experience of incarceration and security azatian that is to say the re distributive welfare state which once governed through ideals of health well being and discipline has given way to a punitive neoliberal regime which takes the crime scene as the basic paradigm of governance and conditions assistance on very forms of victimization or otherwise subjects benefits to means testing as opposed to universal entitlement such as in the case of health care as well as pre exposure prophylaxis and eligibility for Ryan White and aids drug assistance programs mass incarceration in this context is only one of the punitive states techniques or technologies of control in their operational definitions, and what goes on examined is the role of sexual fear and loathing promoting expansive new extra carceral modes of security another case of the carceral state itself as the object of critical attention a part of this project .

So far the war on facts has not gone entirely unchallenged by activists critics scholars lawyers local commentators and journalist as I have represented opinions among each of these groups here in this essay and throughout the course of my project which serves as both evidence of my analysis and for future work that should be done in the same way. Anyone who reads the writings assembled here who takes the trouble to look into the political mobilizations of resistance and critique that they describe or who perceives the scholarly leads provided by these citations will recognize how many individuals organizations and political coalitions have identified an contested the various ways that sex is currently being targeted for regulation and control it is perhaps symptomatic of the current state of sexual politics that the war on sex has yet to receive even from feminist and queer theorists the urgent attention it deserves 3rd you have been defending sexual freedom along all along would benefit from a wider political critical and scholarly consensus in their favor as well as from a rigorous and principled support another purpose of this project accordingly is to underwrite these efforts to

to provide an example of what a policy planning project should look …it's only by highlighting the existence of this issue and by bringing it to the attention of those who might well challenge it if they actually recognized it extent or the magnitude of the threat it poses to our sexual freedoms and our individual liberties is truly what everything I have done here is all about. And I hope the writing is assembled here provide renewed inspiration for a broad and powerful response to future policy work related to sex culture and health .

 

in the specific context of the 2021 General Assembly I have positioned this project to call for renewed critical analysis of the politics of sex itself which cannot be reduced to identity . It is a challenge because it calls into question some of the dominant recent identity based ways of organizing both knowledge and political movements around sex and sexuality. It is an opportunity because it offers to bring together, across differences of identity, many distinct constituencies affected by the politics of sex. In other words , the inequality is produced by sexual politics are often stratified according to the same axes of social differences many other kinds of social inequality. Often but not always as demonstrated by Senate bill 1138 sex as a target of state power is more than just a vehicle for the consolidation of existing social hierarchies rather sex understood as a continuum of practices ranging from the acceptable and approved to the disreputable and disapproved along with the regulatory categories of persons those practices generate having their own politics Sue generic this issue should be seen as an axis of social difference in its own right notwithstanding the governor's Commission on racial equity notwithstanding equality virginians approach for LGBT equalization notwithstanding the health department's attempt to modernize it must be discussed in its own respect as an issue deserving of the full attention and unique analysis grounded in theories relevant to the topics in question .

In conclusion sexual politics in other words is often a solvent of identity it can override the divisions among different social groups that defined themselves by reference to specific identity markers sexual politics require its own analysis why sex? What is it about sex itself that makes it such a ready site for social control? And how do we mobilize politically around it? If this essay does not offer a single answer to that question they provide a number of salient clues and perhaps increase the pressure on all to find both theoretical and practical solutions. How is that I drowned

Without any definitive analysis of the implications of the new bill as signed into law this week I already see a troubling convergence between the increased governmental regulation of Saxon popular movements that contain sexual danger the state's new aggressive interest and HIV dovetails with an extremist an increasingly popular view of HIV infected persons as dangerous disease carriers who pose a threat to local communities I question how easy it is for HIV positive people to be assimilated by the public to the category of sex offender at a cultural level of abstraction people with HIV and violent sex offenders , encoded in the infected sexual battery law itself, appear to be completely fungible and popular discourse one standing in for the other amid call to deprive those with HIV of their civil rights including their right to privacy critical analysis of the implicate implications of sexually transmitted infection and criminal transmission of HIV specifically must be done in the context of the new law and immediately disclosed to the public so they can protect themselves

The urgency with which legislatures reinstated the felony for Senate bill 1138 is evidence that despite the science and social justice issues interpolating this debate it is already always the topicality of sex that is the prime pot of discussion and lengthy prison terms or behavior that occasioned no harm to others but that is associated with socially stigmatized sex far from exceed criminal sentence is normally handed out for manslaughter in similar contexts 30 years of research into the sexual dimensions of the HIV aids epidemic have quantified the risky sexual practices of seemingly every conceivable population at an annual cost of many millions of dollars but only a small handful of studies have examined the impact of criminalizing HIV on the epidemic itself and on human rights more broadly the fact that it is still not possible to determine with any degree of exactitude the number of HIV positive people who have been incarcerated under HIV disclosure laws perhaps 1000 perhaps several 1000 is a telling indication of how little is known about the expanding regulation of sex excessively harsh or linked the punishment for sex crimes even in some cases for behavior that caused no injury are not the most terrifying consequences of the war on set indefinite detention without trial by jury is even more disturbing and this occurs at the cultural level where the power of stigma shame and self denial in prisons the individual in an ever expanding psychiatric confinement.

 

 

The proliferating restrictions placed on sex in context of infected sexual battery for STI exchange, disclosure and its implications on others, PrEP and U=U Risk Reducation as mediated intimacies, technological novelites to surveil and interced in the transmission; as well as the linguistic contents and cognitive structures for thinking about and describing sex as an issue and inquiry.

Analytic Tools

At the intersection of bioscience, identity politics, and market economics, pharmaceuticals such as Truvada* (and, now Discovy*) for pre-exposure (HIV) prophylaxis (PrEP)* and sophisticated antiretrovirals* (ARVS) used to achieve viral suppression, significantly reframe cultural ideas about biology, identity, pleasure, and rights. Potential patients associated with these drugs simultaneously call for and critique medicalization* as societies negotiate which aspects of sex, gender, and daily life should be pharmacologically mediated.

As with Truvada, a single pill that is a combination of ARVs tenofovir and emtricitabine, approved for PrEP, drugs that target sexual behavior often arise from accidental discoveries* before going on to incite major physiological and social changes that both extend and reconfigure existing cultural logics.

This paper will extend extant critiques of the medicalization of sexuality and technologies of mediated intimacies, and present new theories for conceptualizing sex- drugs, and violence- within the culture associated with conflicts of interest, or with change and contradiction, into questions of fundamental interests to the discipline of public health: How do these drugs raise new or illuminate existing questions of embodiment and ontology? Which forms of inequality are challenged and which are stabilized via greater access to these pharmaceuticals? How doe these intersect with other forms of inequality, for example those based on race, class, serostatus, religion, and rurality? How do place, environment, and technological mediation matter for these phenomena?  As we move beyond the sex/gender divide, does medicalization of sexuality reconfigure established (hetero) normative scripts of sexual pleasure and/or pain? OR do drug interventions into sexual lives compel resistance to not only the medicalization, but also the normativity attached to pharma interventions?

The political economy of sexual pleasure** allows us to not only look at pharmaceutical interventions as normative structures that work within and promote particular modalities, but also the resistance and alternative sexual identities and behaviors that emerge in such sexual assemblages. This practicum then aims to create a conversation about what and how public health can contribute to a nuanced understanding of these entanglements.

This project is unique. It examines the role of biomedical technologies on disease prevention in the specific context of antiretroviral drug treatment interventions for pre-exposure prophylaxis and untransmittable viremia and surmises its effect on syndemic incidence of sexually transmitted infection (STI) among the diverse assemblages entangled in interventions to End the HIV Epidemic.

Few studies have considered how exposure to pharmaceutical interventions is contributing to incident STI in minorities at-risk of HIV infection.

Qualitative methods were primarily used in one aspect of this project and quantitative measures centered analysis in another. My work on HIV decriminalization integrated a variety of anthropological research methods and ethnographic fieldwork strategies for data collection and analysis, with a particular focus on the intersectionality of culture, health, and sexuality. This perspective on the issues of criminalization is defined by a general description and locates the project in a cultural domain that is interpretive and interventional. In other words, there is no theory/applied divide.

My work in the General Assembly targeted the sources of stigma in VA Law and the systems of meaning and materiality interpolating this project as a function of cultural (and policy) analysis/advocacy – again, the dichotomy is not fundamental. In the course of this portion of the project, I developed a range of collaborative and interdisciplinary writing, academic, activist, and artistic projects to address issues of HIV criminalization, sexual autonomy, surveillance and punishment, and the construction of knowledge of HIV.

 

 

 

Sources: Terms and Theories

1.      Truvada

2.      Discovy

3.      Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)

4.      Antiretrovirals (ARVs)

5.      Medicalization

6.      Extant discoveries (iPrEx)

a.       First human study to determine whether the ARV medication emtricitabine/tenofovir, sold under the name Truvada among others by Gilead Sciences

7.      Interpretation v. interpolation

 

These are not abstract concepts from fields alien to epidemiology. The biomedical conference attended by DDP leadership last week was centered on desire. Then there it the Healthy Sexuals campaign from years ago, and the new “sexual health” paradigm being promoted by …. Instead of passively promulgating these paradigms of prevention, perhaps public health leadership should properly position social theory at the epicenter of epistemology

Surv. Is the CONSCIENCE

  • Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a daily course of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) taken by HIV-negative people to protect themselves from infection.
  • While PrEP can provide very effective protection against HIV, it does not provide protection against other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and blood-borne illnesses such as Hepatitis C, syphilis, and gonorrhoea.
  • As of 2019, Truvada, a single pill that is a combination of ARVs tenofovir and emtricitabine, is approved for use as PrEP. 
  • For people facing limited options to protect themselves against HIV or for those who can’t or don’t want to use a condom, PrEP allows them to discreetly take control of their HIV risk.16

·         Medicalization

·         contradictions that are associated with conflicts of interest within the culture, or with change

 

 


 

 

 

 

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