AIDS, time, and its stubbornness: sociality, emotions, and policies in an on-line social network

Abstract

From an ethnographic research with people who lives with HIV/AIDS in a group on Facebook, this article problematizes the relationship between disease, time, sociality, emotion, and state-owned practice. In this sense, the trust on the HIV infection as chronic illness and the posts’ members about the governmental actions that dismantle the Brazilian AIDS policy as an element of the group’s sociality was analyzed. Those posts generates ‘tretas’ (a kind of conflict) between the group’s members. The interpretation of the meanings attributed by the informants to the public health policies, and the comprehension of the political and emotional grammars of the ‘tretas’ allows analyses the State place into these policies. The State way to exercise its power through knowledge, discourses, practices, public policies, and technologies’ production that aims to ease up suffering’s experience, extends life, prevents disease and death, without highlight that these acts are dependents from its own actions are the most relevant aspect of this study. In addition, the manner how the State’s interventions to HIV/aids epidemic’s manager and deal cloud, intentionally or not, intensify experiences of social suffering are problematizes in this paper.