In this talk, Gowri Vijayakumar will present her recent book, At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press 2021).
In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channelled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis.
Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliated with the South Asian Studies Program at Brandeis. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis, published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Her articles and essays on gender, sexuality, transnational politics, and the state have appeared or are forthcoming in Gender & Society, Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, Signs, and World Development.
Sharmila Parmanand is an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is completing a manuscript on the politics of sex work and anti-trafficking in the Philippines. She has a PhD in gender studies from the University of Cambridge.