A biopolitics of antibiotic use: Controversies surrounding prophylaxis, antimicrobial resistance, and queer bodies

This paper examines the biopolitics of public health science concerning antibiotic prophylaxis and queer bodies. Some experts recommend that antibiotic prophylaxis should be used to curb the growing burden of sexually transmitted infections among queer people. Other experts caution that antibiotic prophylaxis will contribute to the rise of antibiotic resistance. Prescribers and patients therefore face a dilemma about the use of antibiotics that is yet to be resolved. With reference to queer sociomaterialism, we examine the antibiotic prophylaxis-resistance problem to understand its historical situatedness and the (mis)representation of queer bodies. By drawing on immunity and the body scholarship developed in this journal and elsewhere, we consider the epistemic elisions in the scientific practices of prophylaxis knowledge generation and how experts and advocates have attempted to build consensus with this partial evidence. We identify an agenda for building queer sociomaterial knowledge to help address the antibiotic prophylaxis-resistance nexus.