The Body: Responding to HIV/AIDS

This chapter examines how HIV/AIDS became an occasion to produce knowledge about sexuality in Jamaica when the epidemic first emerged on the island in 1982. At this time, HIV/AIDS was understood to be transmitted through sex, especially sex between men. This chapter focuses on health care workers and examines how they navigated this epidemic through the dual imperatives of surveillance and care. The decisions that they made about what, how, and among whom they shared knowledge about their patients were consequential for individual and population well-being and for how the archives of sexual health took shape. Hierarchies of color, class, and gender structured these workers’ knowledge-making practices such that the same-gender-desiring subjects most associated with HIV/AIDS were poor and working-class Black men.