The birth of the global clinic: Gender, markets, and care in Taiwan’s three AIDS regimes

This dissertation examines the shift in Taiwan’s AIDS response from the exclusion of those deemed morally deviant to the inclusion of epidemiologically defined risk populations. It shows how HIV in Taiwan constitutes a site that reflects the dynamics between international organizations, state institutions, non-state actors, and marginalized groups. This study proposes the concept of AIDS regimes, which are sets of institutionalized practices that produce ways of knowing and acting upon HIV, as a way to trace these dynamics. Drawing on archival and fieldwork research, it describes Taiwan’s three AIDS regimes. Under the metaphorical regime, metaphors were mobilized to construct gendered, raced, and classed others as sources of AIDS. Discursive and physical exclusions of these others were posited to combat the rising epidemic and save the nation. Starting in the 2000s, by utilizing a global HIV estimation technology, the Taiwanese state reframed exclusions as a problem and the elimination of an HIV un-diagnosis gap as a solution to the epidemic under the serological regime. It introduced a market-based logic in its partnerships with domestic NGOs for HIV testing delivery and recast a masculine ideal addressing the target population. Since the 2010s, international organizations have emphasized a universal HIV treatment model’s health and economic benefits. Adopting this model, the Taiwanese state deployed market rationality in the public provision of treatment that valued virally suppressed bodies and linked these bodies with the economy, which signified the rise of the viral regime. This study argues that the global and national AIDS policies promoting efficient biomedical deliveries have created exceptional spaces of care and redistributed power relations and responsibilities. On the one hand, health workers’ care labor, while guided by marketizing and standardizing metrics, were also variously shaped by the sustained social exclusions facing marginalized groups beyond health delivery sites. Cultivating global resilient subjects became possible through these situated, heterogeneous care practices responsive to structural dynamics. On the other hand, these policies generated new categories of difference that could obscure inequalities in health and distributions of care work.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Tseng, Po-Chia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gille, Zsuzsa
• Liao, Tim
• Zerai, Assata
• Decoteau, Claire Laurier
• Moussawi, Ghassan

• AIDS regimes
• bio-citizenship
• the state
• markets
• quantification
• gender
• sexuality
• care
• Taiwan

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Po-Chia Tseng

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113174

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113174