“Prevention does not target the upper Rua Augusta”: homosexuality, HIV, “risk”, and production of borders in the central region of the city of São Paulo

Abstract: This article is part of a research that articulates ethnography, behavioral investigation and HIV prevalence study among gay men, other MSM, travestis and transsexual women in two administrative districts in the central region of the city of São Paulo. It focus on the articulated production of HIV vulnerability, prevention actions, “risk” assignments and city spaces - their territories and borders - considering that such production is permeated by mutually constitutive power relations. Such boundaries, which delimit different places, frequencies and types of establishments, but also hamper prevention actions from being offered, are seen as both symbolic and material. Analysis is centered on: 1) how the studied districts differ among themselves and internally in terms of socioeconomic profile, identities, sexual and protective practices of its people; 2) how the socio-sexual identity is attributed differently in the two studied districts; 3) how the idea of “risk” for HIV infection is attributed in different ways in relation to the two districts; 4) how the socio-spatial distribution of people, establishments, identities and “risk” produces boundaries in the city space, intersecting various social relations of power or social markers of difference.