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HIV has changed in the presence of recent biomedical technologies. In particular, the development of anti-retroviral therapies (ARVs) for the treatment of HIV was a substantial landmark in the history of the disease. Treatment with ARV drug regimens, which begun in 1996, has enabled a heap of thousands to live with the humane immunodeficiency virus without progressing to AIDS. Yet ARVs have also been fraught with difficulties of regimen compliance, viral resistance, and iatrogenic disease. Besides intensifying the technical and ethical complexities of medicine, the drugs have likewise affected conceptions of risk and danger practices, in turn presenting new challenges for prevention.

In order to devise safer, more effective forms of treatment, prevention, and perchance cure, Marsha Rosengarten asserts, it is necessary to comprehend the kinship amongst HIV, medical technologies, and ideas when it comes to the body. HIV is an entity that constitutes and is constituted by complex material and informational environments. Recognition of this two-way traffic amid the medical science of HIV and the expression of HIV in persons and societies provides a novel basis for constructing new or supplementary modes of thinking with regards to and interposing in the epidemic.

Through such diverse materials as drug advertisements, pill formulations, scientific articles, clinical trials, diagnostic test results, and viral imaging as well as consultations with those living and working with HIV, Rosengarten provides numerous demonstrations of how the entities comprising the HIV epidemic - bodies, viral resistance, diagnostic results, safe sex - are forged through dynamic relations.

These respective phenomena challenge existent preventative action models and raise social and ethical worries with regards to the affect of further and added technologies such as HIV pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis and the promise of vaccines and microbicides.

HIV Interventions is applicable to those engaged in questions of the social and ethical dimensions of biomedicine, biotechnology, and genomics. Further, the specific focus of the project offers HIV practitioners - in the sciences and social sciences, in clinical research, clinical practice, social research, policy development and preventative action education - new perspectives and analytic tools for intercepting a virus that proceeds to endure and, most critically, to alter in the course of doing so.

Review"A very complex and essential book that bridges ordinary intellectual/cultural studies of HIV and feminist science/social studies in medicine. Both audiences will learn a outstanding deal from this book, which calls for a rethinking of how technologies, particularly treatments, have reframed the body in general, and of those who have HIV in particular." Cindy Patton, Simon Fraser University "This book is efficaciously the original in ten years to engage seriously with HIV science and technology, and accordingly is long overdue." -Catherine Waldby, author of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism "In this noteworthy and timely work, Marsha Rosengarten makes the compelling argument that to approach the issue of HIV intervention as if selective information and flesh are distinct - as if the task of intervention is plainly to convince fleshy bodies to behave according to the info - constrains our capacity to think the processes and relationships at stake. Writing with admirable concision and clarity, she transfigures a theoretical terrain too long encumbered by such restrictive understandings in order to provide an alternative, nuanced perspective on how the HIV assemblage - the virus, the diagnostic apparatuses, antiretroviral treatments, pharmaceutical tryouts and interests, humane embodiment and wider responses to HIV - comprises of a myriad of processes that rather in a literal sense inform matter. Well beyond argues on 'performativity v matter' and 'technological v organic', this erudite work holds the best arguments I know for the political importance of thinking through the significances of such 'informed matter'." ---Vikki Bell, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

About the AuthorMarsha Rosengarten is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.