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Gowri Vijayakumar, "At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Gowri Vijayakumar, "At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response" (Stanford UP, 2021)
ratings:
Length:
63 minutes
Released:
Aug 10, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
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 channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response (Stanford UP, 2021) 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 Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.
Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.
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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 Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.
Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Aug 10, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011): When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines! by New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work