Risk and Respectability: Reinventing Sexuality in State-NGO HIV Prevention Programs

Abstract

The “AIDS industry” has been a contested topic for scholars of sex work and sexuality in India. Predictions of an AIDS crisis in India in the 1990s led to an influx of global funding for HIV prevention programs targeted toward sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people. These programs were managed by a state agency, the National AIDS Control Organization, but implemented through non-governmental and community-based organizations (NGOs and CBOs). Existing scholarship shows that this incorporation of civil society into state programs both furthered epidemiological surveillance into intimate life and created openings for activist claims on the state. In this article, I argue that HIV prevention programs, as mediators of state public health imperatives and the everyday lives of “at-risk” targets, became sites for cultivating new ways of naming, embodying, and practicing sexuality. Drawing on ethnographic and in-depth interview fieldwork in Bangalore, I show how HIV prevention workers cultivated respectable ways of dressing, speaking, soliciting clients, and moving through public space, while learning how to speak openly in the right contexts and at the right times. HIV drop-in centers became a route to respectable sexuality, an index of class and caste, that enabled new individual and collective engagements with the state while generating room for collective care. As sociologists increasingly turn to the state’s production of legible subjects, HIV prevention programs in India provide an instructive site for demonstrating how, at the interface of state and civil society, sexual respectability was central to both surveillance and the formation of collective demands.