The difference practice makes: Evidence, articulation, and affect in HIV prevention.

This paper considers the difference that a conception of sex as social practice has made to the relations articulated in HIV social research in Australia. In defining sexual practice as "fluid, embedded in specific social formations, and involving the negotiation of meaning" (Kippax & Stephenson, 2005), social researchers put their own research categories and questions at risk by constructing situations in which the objects of research were given occasions to counter researchers' presumptions through the use of their own categories. Taking this risk produced sharp insights about the evolving dynamics of gay sexuality in this context and produced distinctive, interesting findings. It enabled the articulation of the practice of negotiated safety and later strategies of HIV risk reduction emerging from gay men's practice, for example. I draw on Latour's (2004) concept of articulation to make sense of these innovations and cut through some of the key distinctions that organize HIV research: qualitative/quantitative; social/biomedical; subject/ object; human/nonhuman; interpretations/evidence. Rather than rest on the organizing power of these distinctions, keeping HIV prevention effective, engaging and interesting will require specific attention to the embodied articulation of HIV relations in the present.