Risk, sexuality and economy

From the mid 1980s onwards HIV/AIDS became a new subject of work reform, with a range of experts producing new knowledges on work and the worker in regard to HIV/AIDS and workplace organizations putting in place workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programmes. To date, much of the discussion in sociology in regard to such policies and programmes has focused on the issue of effectiveness and has been concerned with making such policy 'better'. In this article however, and with particular reference to sexuality, I suggest that such approaches fail to register that workplace HIV/AIDS policies concern new conceptualizations of worker identities. Specifically, I suggest that such policies may be viewed as part of an assemblage of work reforms which are reworking worker identities as risk identities. Thus I argue that workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programmes are best understood as risk rationalities. Further, I consider the alignment between such rationalities and neo-liberal modes of rule, and in particular consider the ways in which workplace HIV/AIDS policies render both HIV/AIDS and sexuality calculable and governable in terms of notions of risk, self-responsibility and self-management.