Abstract – Bali is lauded nationally and internationally for its exemplary HIV-related care services, especially for often underserved key populations. In spite of this, a startling number of young HIV–positive gay men and transgender women (waria) refuse to start or continue the anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments that offers them the biomedical promise of having long and healthy lives. Understanding this failure of adherence as a lack of care for oneself, care–givers encourage newly diagnosed waria to enroll in ARV–trainings that aim to impose an inflexible conception of clock time over the more pliant conceptions of “rubber time” that generally characterize the flows of waria everyday lives. Time and temporality, then, appear to matter most as a recalibration of tempos, of adjusting to the rigid rhythms and repetitive routines that are tied to the biomedical efficacy of anti-retroviral medication, while the temporality of having a long life as an unquestioned good goes unchallenged. Yet, as I will show, the conceptions of self and temporal outlooks of biomedical care fit uneasily with those of familial care – a care context many waria valued much more. For example, the self-acceptance and openness encouraged in HIV trainings contradict the silencing and opacity necessary for the maintenance of kinship ties. The unquestioned good of having a long life, then, loses appeal when the life it promises is one without family. I thus suggest to understand waria’s failure to commit to ARV–regimens not as a lack of care, but in light of a process of ethically reconciling the divergent possibilities for being-in-the-world implied in biomedical and familial care as well as the temporal horizons they enable or foreclose. 

Bio – Sylvia Tidey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Studies Program at the University of Virginia. Her two research projects on civil service corruption and LGBT-related care in Indonesia interrogate how the normative dimensions of globally circulating ideologies of improvement interact with the ethical complexities of everyday life.