Narratives Under Influence: Understanding How Hiv Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (Prep) Reshapes Gay Homosociality in a City in Southern Brazil

This master’s research, situated in the field of Education, investigates how HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) reconfigures homosocial dynamics (Maffesoli, 2012) among gay men in the context of pharmacopornographic biocapitalism. It seeks to understand how the “PrEP-subject” re-signifies sexuality and sexual practices in the face of prevailing norms, problematizing the ethical-political implications of this biomedical intervention. The investigation aims to tension how knowledge, bodies, and technologies intertwine, producing dissident subjectivities and pedagogies, especially within the intersections of desire, risk, pleasure, and control. Qualitative research with a cartographic inspiration (Alves, 2003), conducted with 15 cisgender men who use PrEP and live in a city in southern Brazil. The investigation used situated conversations and narrative analysis, prioritizing attentive listening to tactics mobilized in response to regimes of control and discourses on pharmacopower (Preciado, 2023). The process included a field diary as a recording device for affects, displacements, and emergent fieldwork dynamics, treating writing as an analytical tool. Analysis sought to connect race and class social markers to different modes of PrEP adherence, considering material, symbolic, and subjective conditions shaping access, use, and meanings attributed to this biomedical technology. Preliminary results and conclusion: PrEP-mediated homosociality reveals a sexual pedagogy marked by paradoxes: its emancipatory potential, by expanding autonomy over sexual practices, coexists with devices of biopolitical regulation and control. In this scenario, reducing health inequities cannot ignore the structural racism present in public services nor the need for strategies dismantling stigmas surrounding PrEP users ‒ from “risk compensation” narratives to discourses of “collective responsibility.” Expanding access and adherence among vulnerable populations requires intersectional policies that recognize structural inequalities and promote more equitable and context-sensitive ethical-political forms of care, attentive to pluralities of bodies, desires, and social contexts.