Is the chronicity of HIV/AIDS fragile? Biomedicine, politics and sociability in an online social network*

Objective: to understand how the relationships between chronicity and politics shape sociability and mutual help among people living with HIV/AIDS. Method: This is a virtual ethnography in a closed group on Facebook. To collect the information, on-lineparticipant observation and documental analysis were utilized. 37 posts were analyzed using the softwareNVivo 12 Pro and the thematic coding technique. Results: Two thematic categories emerged: Do the treatment and time will take care of the rest: Mutual help and HIV/AIDS as a chronic condition; and Yes, there is danger around the corner, my dear: Politics, conflicts and sociability in the group. The most relevant aspect of this study concerns the evidence of the fragility of the discourse on the chronicity of HIV/AIDS. Conclusion: Through the analysis of sociability and mutual help produced among the members of the investigated group, it was possible to apprehend the ways in which, in their experiences on living with HIV/AIDS as a chronic condition, the relationships between health-disease, politics and time showed the dependence between chronicity and the State, and its impacts on daily life.


Introduction
In the early 1980s, the epidemic caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) brought to the fore and updated old social representations linked to infectious diseases: evil, horror, withering, contamination, disorder, transgression and death (1) . Since then, worldwide, 32 million people have died from AIDS-related diseases, and in 2018 it was estimated that there were 37.9 million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), the majority of whom were adults (36.2 million) (2) . In this panorama, the unequal incidence of HIV/AIDS between regions and countries stands out, which requires attention to structural difficulties (education, economics, costs, stigma, health system, etc.) that are not mitigated only by the health system (3)(4)(5) . It is estimated that, in 2018, of the total PLWHA in the world, only 23.3 million had access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) (2) .
Despite these figures, the global incidence of HIV infection and mortality from AIDS has decreased: from 2.9 million in 1997 to 1.7 million in 2018; 55% reduction since 2004 (1.7 million) compared to 2018 (770 thousand), respectively (2) . In Brazil, the number thousand inhab.) (6) .
This scenario, associated with biomedical advances and access to ART by public policies, leveraged the discourse that HIV infection is no longer a death sentence, because if it is not cured, it can be controlled, which made it chronic (7) . The decade of 2010 was marked by announcements by government agencies, scientists and activists about the "end of AIDS" (5,8) . From the perspective of socio-anthropological studies on chronic diseases and HIV/AIDS, this article problematizes such discourse, since researchers in the social sciences and public health highlight that the optimism and triumphalism of both the chronicity of HIV/AIDS and its end need to be addressed and be analyzed by a critical sieve, in view of the dependence on access to ART to guarantee the chronicity of infection (3)(4)(5)8) .
In view of the above, it is questioned how the discourse on the chronicity of HIV/AIDS modulates sociability and mutual help among PLWHA in an online social network. In these terms, the urgency of investigations that analyze policies related to AIDS at a global level, particularly in the global South, has been highlighted, and the importance of anthropological research has been emphasized, given its ability to produce critical, reflective and politically engaged interpretations (8) . The objective was to understand how the relations between chronicity and politics shape sociability and mutual help among PLWHA.

Method
Ethnography was used here as a methodology, research strategy and intellectual posture, as it allowed to understand aspects of social life from a decentralized perspective and from the point of view of those who experience a given phenomenon (9) . Given the object of this study (sociability among people on the internet), a virtual ethnography was carried out. Special attention was devoted to understanding an online/offline continuum to avoid the hasty interpretations that conceive sociability on the internet as a mere virtuality of the real, given the absence of physical spatiality (10) .  This material was submitted to thematic codification through a detailed analysis of passages of the text by the three authors. After analyzing all the reports, a table was produced in which the nuclei of meanings were defined. Finally, based on the cores of meanings generated, thematic categories were constructed (11) . For validation and reliability of this research, the following criteria were used: triangulation of data, theory and researchers; long period of fieldwork; and rich and detailed descriptions of the field (12) . The excerpts used in this article are accompanied by the fictitious name of the interlocutor, chosen randomly by the authors, and the date of posting.

Results
After analyzing and interpreting the empirical

Politics, conflicts and sociability in the group
At the beginning of the fieldwork, sociability among group members used to be guided by the rules of use,

Discussion
The most relevant aspect of the results of this study concerns the evidence of the fragility of the discourse of chronic HIV infection, given its intrinsic dependence on access to the ART. The chronicity of HIV infection dates back to the late 1980s with the emergence of the "cocktail" of pills that enabled advances in treatment and shifted the emphasis from the urgency of AIDS to a long-term survival model (3) . Since the first drugs, the biotechnological escalation, associated with universal distribution policies, has enabled significant advances in treatment, emphasizing, increasingly, the belief in its long duration (13)(14)(15) .
In Brazil, Federal Law 9.313/1996 became a political-legal framework in the Brazilian response to infection by instituting the free distribution of ART, which placed Brazil at the global vanguard of combating the epidemic (16) . On the world stage, the decade of 2010 began with a new phase in the fight against AIDS.
Several government agencies, such as UNAIDS, have started to spread the discourse that we are about to reach an AIDS-free generation (7) . This wave of optimism about the possibility of curing or ending AIDS has won supporters from different social sectors (8) .
For some researchers, this discourse is based on the biomedicalization of responses to the epidemic and the consequent chronification of HIV infection. In this sense, it is highlighted that what makes it chronic is the continuous and reliable access to the ART, considering that its pathophysiological, clinical and epidemiological nature is infectious-contagious (3,5,8,17) . In countries with a universal and free national health system, such as Brazil, As highlighted in other ethnographies conducted in Florida and Maryland (United States) (5) and in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) (18) , our interlocutors constructed narratives in which HIV and AIDS were represented as crises of the past, whose negative marks should be forgotten. Thus, they envisioned new moral economies in a future where the stigma would be reduced by access to the treatment (5) and health would be seen as "a duty, an ethics and aesthetics that make the appearance of ugliness, pain, illness and death impossible" (18) . This morality allowed the positivization of life with HIV/AIDS -a way of life produced by the shaping of themselves, their personal attributes, their emotions and the transformation of these people into self-governors (17)(18) . United States and Sierra Leone (17) . This temporality implied, therefore, in the synchronization of the "life" of the virus to that of the affected person; from everyday time to the "time of adhesion"; and daily routine to pharmaceutical bureaucracy in health systems (17) . Thus, to have a normal life meant "an individual's continuous, symbiotic, productive and borderline relationship with the virus throughout life" (17) .
The sociability and mutual help produced in the group reinforced the performance of time as an agent who worked on relationships and rewrote life (19) .
Given the biographical disruptions (20)  In this context, the role of biomedicine and health policies was, from the perspective of the interlocutors, to outline the lines of the paper on which these life projects would be written. This "scribe" of the social actors derived from the modeling of their subjectivities and from the time as an agent who worked in relationships, making possible to rewrite, reframe, and reinterpret the memories and texts of the suffering (19) which, in this case, resulted from the impossibility of thinking about the future after the shock of the diagnosis.
The work of time (19) proved to be relevant for some members of the group, since the shared experiences of suffering used to be related to the permanence of the stigma. It was possible to understand the craft of living with HIV/AIDS, where the promises offered by biomedicine did not seem to be able to explain the vicissitudes of lives that develop in a social space located between "being sick while being normal" (3) .
In our analysis, these temporal and emotional grammars, as well as the ART, seemed to have "side effects", since the processes of subjectification they engendered were based on a "liberal individual ontology" (21) that, when tying the "negative history of AIDS" (18) in a past overcome by the progress, it also seems to have trapped the understanding of AIDS as a "political problem" (21) . These grammars had strong links with optimism and triumphalistic discourses about the "end of AIDS" (8) .
In terms of global health, the literature has already signaled the effects of this enthusiasm in the formulation of public policies and in the organization of the health care services (8,21) . In Brazil, it is observed that, in recent deal with collective subjects or social movements.

Medicalization coexists very well with individualization:
With the isolated individual, who is always an other (21) .
The exhaustion of AIDS as an "intense political issue" (21) in sociability and mutual help among the interlocutors seemed to reproduce a "greenhouse" that tried to balance the ethics and aesthetics of the happy seropositive (18) with the gradual assaults suffered by the Brazilian response to the epidemic. In the "greenhouse" are "us", those who have access to services and biotechnologies, the adherents, the undetectable, the normal. Out of it are the "others", those who are far away from me, those who do not adhere, those who go to get medicine and receive fractional amounts (or do not receive). In this "AIDS greenhouse", posts with complaints about the dismantling of the SUS and its consequences on AIDS policy, were received like stones thrown against a fragile glass ceiling.
The open "cracks" destabilized the tenuous balance maintained between a tied past, a stray present and an always precarious, vulnerable, dependent future. The conflicts that gained prominence in sociability among the members of the group expressed these movements between the interior and the exterior of the "AIDS greenhouse". They brought to the group the political and ideological divisions that currently mark Brazilian public life (22) . More than that, the contents posted and the tretas illustrated the effects of a time that seemed to want to return through the veins opened by the growth of conservatism, of the far-right in Brazil and its impacts on AIDS policy.
At present, the tentacles of that time, which seemed forbidden by science, updated emotions meant as panic and climate of fear, typical of the 1980s and 1990s.
Thus, they revealed ruptures and continuities between the "crisis of the past" (5) and the promises of an AIDSfree future (7) . Furthermore, they brought the public and private arenas closer to everyday life by bringing political processes and decisions close to the extent that they were felt in the threat of the impossibility of fulfilling treatment as a moral imperative.