Revealing Truth through Diagnostics: From Disclosure Laws to Clinical Research for Novel Drug Development

This article examines the changing role of ‘confessional technologies’ (Foucault 1990) over history HIV pandemic, beginning when US public health departments first rolled out testing campaigns and continuing in present day through expansion diagnostic practices to support development implementation pharmaceutical technologies for prevention. Across this decades-long history, have been shaped by ethical principles, legal mandates, research priorities, which compelled individual who is ‘at risk’ acquiring speak about their sexual thus reveal hidden truths one’s self an intimate Other (Whitacre 2018). Indeed, ethics long focused on confession as a means disciplining safe sex managing pleasure (Race 2007) relied these techniques secure resources survival (Nguyen 2010). I argue that confessions recently become productive generate evidence efficacy pharmaceuticals. Practices revealing truth contributed clinical interventions, including use antiretrovirals oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Considering contemporary enabling drug products facilitating market growth, contend confessing should be understood form labour.