Weil, B., & Ledin, C. (2019). PrEP at the After/Party: The “Post-AIDS” Politics of Frank Ocean’s “PrEP+”. Somatosphere. 4 Nov. [Online].

The medical anthropology journal Somatosphere has published a co-authored article about Frank Ocean’s recent “PrEP+ Party”. In this essay, Ben Weil and I examine Ocean’s attempt to revivify the HIV prevention-access circuit party using HIV prevention history. This piece considers how the biomedical technology HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is employed, first, to recall dance cultures from the 1980s and, second, to construct an “inclusive” social space through the prism of HIV/AIDS history. We suggest that the co-optation of PrEP to create a version of the prevention-access circuit party in the late 2010s evokes a particular image culture that is “not-about-AIDS”.

In an effort to signify cultural inclusivity, Ocean’s circuit party over-simplifies the medicalised histories of the circuit party and thus re-constructs technological determinism through anachronism. Different than creating positive (+) social networks for people living with HIV, and those communities deeply impacted by HIV transmission, Ocean’s circuit party reifies and absolves the “post-AIDS” pharmaceutical and medical realities that continue to bar access to HIV prevention both locally and globally. Thus, we draw attention to the ways in which PrEP shapes or ought to shape life beyond the clinical experience. We counter Ocean’s mis/context by turning to video artist Leo Herrera’s (2018) “post-AIDS” project, which constructs a differently politicised queer-led healthcare reform using the prevention-access circuit party. We argue that Herrera’s project provides a more compelling revisioning of the prevention-access party and employs a critically-applied approach which scholars might use to better understand sociocultural context/s in medical anthropology. In our view, the contexts of PrEP far exceed the walls and gaze of the clinic, where PrEP is often framed as residing, and must be understood to include (queer) social, sexual and cultural spaces, like the circuit party, which are implicated in and can help to shape the politics of PrEP and prevention access.