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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• LGBTQIA+
• pandemics
• COVID-19
• HIV/AIDS
• activism
• NGOs
• donors

Acknowledgements

The activists we interviewed for this article inspire us with their vision, commitment, and resilience. We thank them for taking the time to speak with us. We also thank Shubangini Jain and the staff at the Solidarity Foundation for their support with transcription and Michael Brazda for his work on data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the case of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, the main actors in the response we discuss are Indian NGOs and activist organizations. We sometimes refer to these more generally as ‘civil society organizations.’ However, depending on the geographic and historical context, the institutional configuration of a crisis response differs.

2 The first cases of HIV were identified in India in the mid-1980s (Jayaraman, 1986). Today, some 2.3 million people are estimated to be living with HIV in India, with an estimated adult (15–49) prevalence of 0.22% (NACO & ICMR, 2021, pp. 4–5).

3 In this paper, we use the terms ‘sex worker,’ ‘sexual minority,’ and ‘transgender’ to describe the groups with whom the organizations in our study worked with most extensively. These are overlapping categories. ‘Sex worker’ organizations most often include cisgender women, but transgender women, and those who identify as kothi (gender-non-conforming feminine people) and hijra (members of a traditional community of transgender or third-gender feminine people) also do sex work, in addition to gay men and other men who have sex with men. We use ‘LGBTQIA+’ when referring to the international literature on sexual minorities and transgender people.

4 Despite imposing these restrictions, the Modi government called on NGOs to help with the COVID-19 response in May 2021 (Yamunan, 2021).

5 The first known case of COVID-19 in India was identified on 27 January 2020 (Andrews et al., 2020). By April 2021, a second wave had arrived and nearly 19 million had been diagnosed with COVID-19. According to some estimates, between 3.4 and 4.9 million people have died of COVID-19 in India (Anand et al., 2021), though the official count is around 495,050 (CSSE, 2022; Dong et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tomberg Research Fund and the Theodore and Jane Norman Fund at Brandeis University.