India and Africa in the pandemic imagination

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. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Between pandemics: sex worker, sexual minority, and transgender activism from HIV to COVID-19.

Public health crises alter political landscapes. This article investigates social movement strategies during and between the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics. We conducted a set of eighteen in-depth interviews with eleven leaders of organisations working with sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people around India, all of whom had been actively involved in HIV prevention programs, before and after the arrival of COVID-19 in India. First HIV, and then COVID-19, altered the political landscape for these groups in relation to three types of institutions: (1) donors (by creating dramatic increases and decreases in the amount, type, and conditions of global funding and deepening inequalities among organisations) (2) the state (by shifting the balance of advocacy and human rights work toward immediate relief); and (3) other social movements (by expanding solidarities across groups but also placing them in competition for limited resources). We argue that, to weather these dramatic shifts, organisations relied on internal alliances and resources built in and after periods of crisis. In this way, despite the differences between the two pandemics, the legacies of HIV shaped the response to COVID-19. Though responses to COVID-19 seem improvised and temporary, they build on a longer-term social movement infrastructure.