A Life Surveilled by: A Part of the Cluster It is us now soon it will be you, and then the world entire. If my body is no longer mine, if the code that shapes me is seized, observed, controlled I vanish. Not shadow, not echo, not life nothing. A hollow absence, a void where self once clung, a cog grinding without purpose, a life drained of meaning, a silence that swallows even the memory of my name. Molecular HIV surveillance renders intimate biology legible to power, translating private viral histories into instruments of population control. The body is no longer sovereign; it is subsumed into circuits of governance, where consent is irrelevant and unfreedom is embedded in the very architecture of knowledge. By extracting genetic sequences from within the body, molecular HIV surveillance makes the intimate biology of infection- sex, sharing syringes, tattooing, breastfeeding, giving birth (the expressions of love, art, life itself )- legible to the state. The genome b...
Writings in Anthropology & Public Health