A significant body of scholarship analyzing AIDS governance has presumed a distinction between AIDS as a biological term and the social activities governing it. Such a view, this study argues, overlooks the shifting, hybrid natures of both AIDS and the governing mechanisms through which it is approached. Building on Michel Callon’s performative approach to markets, this study examines three quasi-markets constructed as policy tools to control the AIDS epidemic in Taiwan over time. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, this study argues that globally circulating public health knowledge and technologies pertinent to epidemic prevention were mobilized to do two things: 1) reframe the ontologies of AIDS to render them detached from illegible moral categories and, moreover, calculable; and 2) enable differing calculative agents to emerge in diversified quasi-markets. Yet, the framings that constructed the quasi-markets also produced different forms of risks (or “externalities”) for the individuals who were turned into values, which has an implication for the politics of framing in a transnational context.
To access the workshop: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/2260387695
