This section features original research on desire in the context AIDS prevention efforts. While academic theories of sexuality and the social organization of AIDS expertise have blossomed in response to the cultural and political questions raised by the epidemic, their cross-fertilization with applied HIV prevention has been limited by a lack of a common language between public health, behavioral research, and cultural studies. By better understanding the relationship between desire, transgression, and power, we can design prevention interventions that are less likely to engender resistance and denial mechanisms.
The Theorizing Desire Conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for the critique of prevention theory as well as a showcase for innovative approaches. This section of the web page presents original papers from a conference (Managing Desire) that was organized by Nicolas Sheon in April 9-10, 1996 in Berkeley. This conference was organized by INWOGOHARP, and sponsored by The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Berkeley Free Clinic HIV Prevention Services Collective. The quality of the both presentations and the ensuing discussions was excellent. Of the thirty-six papers from that conference, eight have so far been submitted for the web site. Once the web site is on-line, this section will be augmented with new submissions both from participants at the Berkeley conference and those who were unable to attend. Unlike traditional conferences, the web page will be accessible twenty four hours a day to virtually all academics and community based organizations around the globe. Many of the papers describe specific interventions and methods to evaluate the impact of interventions. Therefore this section will be useful to prevention practitioners, administrators as well as researchers.
The time has come to re-evaluate the models of desire that have informed HIV prevention education. We should no longer conceptualize desire as a kind of biological black box managed by individualized cost/benefit calculations. Unfortunately this is still the prevailing model dominating epidemiology and behavioral science. Desire is psychologically, culturally, historically, and materially, and locally constructed and signified within dyadic relationships, communities, subcultures, and through the public health apparatus.
What has been the role of HIV prevention education itself in inciting and delimiting the expression of desire? To what extent do prevention messages create backlash and spaces for transgressive identities enacted through unsafe sexual practices? What are the consequences of the seemingly unavoidable opposition between desire and knowledge? HIV prevention has until know been structured around assessing and adding to knoweldge. People are saturated with knowledge to the point that much of it is contradictory. This is perhaps clearest with the example of the controversy over the risks of unprotected oral sex. These contradictions have lead many, quite understandably, to distrust prevention messages all together.
This points to the question of power. Is desire a transgressive response to power? If so then any attempt to impose rationality to manage desire would appear doomed. We need to start our work as prevention educators with an appreciation of the contradictions inherent in any attempt to control behaviors as complex and full of significance as unsafe sex. Can prevention education be built around desire, improvisation, spontaneity, while keeping knowledge and calculation safely out of the picture?