Neoliberalism, Masculinity, and HIV Risk

Health science research on HIV risk focuses strongly on psychological traits of individuals as determinants of health and vulnerability. This paper seeks to place these findings in a larger social context marked by neoliberalism to provide some insights into the arenas of vulnerability to risk. These arenas are shaped by shifts in the environing political economy which generate subjectivities concordant with the pressures of the neoliberal turn to increasing marketization, individualization, and responsibilization. These pressures create cultures of expectation that accentuate particular trends defining success, masculinity, and risk in contemporary societies. In other words, the “risk factors,” identified in the now voluminous research literature on HIV, cumulate in particular social locations that, at least in part, articulate with masculine gender performance in marketplaces. These intersections affect the expression of sex between men and vulnerabilities to risk, providing an alternative understanding to the deficit models currently in health science research.