On HIV assemblages, inequalities and subject formation

Drawing on our situated experience as geographers of sexualities living and working in the Minority World, this response addresses some of the concerns raised by our interlocutors around the use of assemblage thinking, socio-spatial inequalities and subject formation.

A reflective review on gay and bisexual men in China

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), Treatment as Prevention (TasP), and undetectability affect the experience of gay and bisexual men living with HIV. They also link ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ to raw sex and the use of recreational drugs as they relate to sexual practices among gay and bisexual men. From these insights, we can think about the complex connections between biomedical innovations in the field of HIV, sexual practices, subjectivity, pleasure, spaces, and technologies. This commentary offers a sociocultural perspective based on a study with 28 male sex workers (hereafter MSWs) on gay and bisexual men—mainly male sex workers— and their wives (Tongqi) in China.

Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.

Rescuing the map from the nation

Tania Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti seek to rescue the national map from nationalism. Or at least from that nationalism characterized by reactionary, tradition-bound, and exclusionary practices and imaginaries. The authors provide readers with an insightful and challenging article on reimagining what national maps are, how they function, and what they could be if recast through the perspective of those often excluded and/or marginalized from the nation. Their article is both a critique of the manner in which national maps have typically been understood in the literature and an invitation to rethink national maps through everyday cartographic practices and vernacular mappings. But what is the national map in the first place? What counts as vernacular? And why is mapping privileged as the site for cultivating progressive imaginaries?

Antiblackness within the assemblages of undetectability

This commentary is concerned with the role of anti-blackness for North American-based Black gender and sexual minorities in Brown's and Di Feliciantonio ‘Reconceptualising of PrEP, TasP and Undetectability’ . The commentary centers anti-blackness in order to address concerns within Feliciantonio and Brown's conceptualization of assemblages and subject formation within these spaces. In considering anti-blackness, the commentary points to the ways Black gender and sexual minorities are addressing barriers to accessing biomedical interventions through the promise of an AIDS-Free future that has not fully been realized within their communities. As such, this commentary argues that in addressing anti-blackness, Black communities are engaging in a queer futurity that expands the impact of biomedical interventions through the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

Of waters and bridges

The commentaries in this forum provide thoughtful and stimulating responses to my article, ‘Keeping You Post-ed’. My answer will first focus on naming specific periods of time, after which I focus on the impact that the designation ‘post’ has, and for how long, before moving to the question of new languages. Finally, I suggest that we should relinquish the optimism too often nested in a ‘post’ situation and rather concentrate on labors that convey hope.