Prevention Practices of HIV / AIDS and process of subjectivation

Abstract

Since public policies for prevention and control of HIV/Aids address the individuals' sexual activity in order to prevent risky sexual behavior, one can infer the normative character of such interventions, as they assess the subject's conduct using health criteria, which are imposed as a measure for sexual experience. As such, one can also assume that strategies based on preventive codes to regulate sexual behavior involve a process of subjectivation. This contention is based on the Foucauldian conceptions of moral experience, which he divides into three aspects: the rule, the actions, and the relationship with oneself. The sexual behavior was made object of preventive measures against HIV/Aids based on a medical knowledge field which approaches health from the relationship between organism and environment, including all the biopsychosocial aspects. Accordingly, individuals are taken as targets of health policies because of the vulnerability that is ascribed to sexual behavior. It is thus a question of investigating the risk factors related to the occurrence of the syndrome among the population. Hence, it is due to the underlying statute of vulnerability attributed to the expression of sexuality that individuals internalize the health guidance, applying it to their relationship with themselves, and impose on themselves a healthy sexual behavior. So, this paper investigates the prevalence of medical guidance in subjects' sexual attitudes, based on the intrinsic relations between the way the individual is addressed by medical knowledge and the process by which individuals direct their actions in order to obey health guidance.