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Relegation Of Responsibility Essay

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The Relegation of Responsibility based upon the Introduction of New HIV-Related Technologies
Undoubtedly, the way individuals act within society is a direct result of the expectation that society places upon them. There are a plethora of ways that an individual can distinguish themselves as conforming to the desires of society or rejecting those desires, those choices heavily impacting the way in which they are perceived by society. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, these ideas of socially ordained responsibility become unavoidable, as matters of public and personal health become a means with which individuals, who have to deal with the implications the epidemic had on society, can be discriminated by. This shifting subjectivity based …show more content…

Prior to the existence of HIV Antibody Testing, when the gay community at large became a titular ‘at-risk’ group as the, at the time, unknown virus became in some ways became intrinsically liked to the homosexual ‘lifestyle’ (Siedman 1997), the experience of the homosexual community was one based upon a shared responsibility to address the AIDS virus and establish a precedent of safe sex to keep the community safe. The notion that friends could at any moment begin to show symptoms of the virus and soon after succumb to the fatal nature of the unknown virus created an environment where risk was associated with the entire community and therefore needed to be address with the same level of rigor throughout the whole community. However with the introduction of the HIV Antibody Test, a test that can determine HIV status and that would objectively lower transmission rates due to knowledge of seropositivity and the measures that would follow that knowledge, this community wide sentiment of equal action and responsibility found itself profoundly altered. The notion of the entire gay community being an ‘at-risk’ entity shifted to distinctions between members of the community that, due to their now

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