Living with Antiretrovirals? HIV/AIDS, Body, Inequality, and Gender in Marta Dillon’s Columns (Argentina, 1995–2003)

Abstract

This article analyzes the inscription of antiretroviral treatment in Marta Dillon’s columns published between 1995 and 2003 in the supplement No, approached as a cultural archive of HIV in Argentina. Drawing on a qualitative approach and a chronological reading of the corpus, it examines how therapeutic experience is narrated in a context of shifting biomedical consensus, marked by the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), commonly known as triple therapy, and by profound inequalities in access. The analysis shows that medication does not appear as a stable technical device or a linear guarantee of survival, but rather as an experience shaped by temporal asynchronies, uncertainty, and unequal material conditions, intensified by economic crisis and the neoliberal context of the 1990s. It also argues that Dillon’s writing displaces the centrality of medical knowledge by integrating treatment into a broader framework that articulates motherhood, desire, activism, and community networks, thereby configuring a choral space that renders visible voices marginalized by state policies. Within this framework, antiretrovirals operate as a pharmakon: both a promise of continuity and a reminder of vulnerability. The article concludes that these columns discuss with hegemonic narratives of HIV while producing situated forms of embodied memory and health citizenship, in dialogue with the material and political conditions that structure the experience of illness.