India and Africa in the pandemic imagination

Abstract

In moments of disease panic, sex workers in India have been both abandoned and targeted, subjects of simultaneous fascination, pity, and fear. This article traces the reproduction of a link between sex work and disease, through syphilis, HIV, and COVID-19. In particular, it analyzes popular media and public health literature on the early HIV epidemic in India to emphasize the centrality of transnational comparison and South-South expert linkages, mediated through Northern academic institutions, in constructing sex workers as vectors of disease. I argue that the link between sex workers and HIV solidified within a global field of relational comparisons between India, Africa, and the West, within which sex work crystallized anxieties about the morality of the nation. In the early 1980s, Indian public health experts and journalists contrasted a heterosexual India to a homosexual West, aligning India’s AIDS trajectory with those of African countries and marking sex workers as vectors of HIV. By the 1990s, this comparison shifted into one that positionedAfrica’s AIDS epidemic as the worst of what India could become. Within this global field of comparisons and circuit of AIDS expertise, the link between sex work and HIV became an unquestionable truth.