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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• India
• HIV/AIDS
• India-Africa

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In this article, I default to the term ‘sex worker,’ in line with current academic and activist terminology, but use ‘prostitute’ when it is more historically appropriate. The term sex worker in English was not in use until the late 1970s (Leigh 1997) and was only later incorporated into medical and public health discourse.

2 This linear developmental logic that marks some diseases as diseases of ‘growth’ appears again in discourses of cancer (Banerjee 2020) and diabetes (Moran-Thomas 2019).

3 In 1988, A. S. Paintal, the director-general of the Indian Council for Medical Research, asked the Health Ministry to ban sex with all foreigners. However, the request was largely ridiculed in the press (Bhargava and Devadas 1988; Hazarika 1988). Those traveling to India for less than a year – more likely to be Western tourists than African students – were not subject to the same testing requirements.

4 My discussion of influential studies of Nairobi prostitutes in the 1980s is based on Karen Booth’s (2004, 79) meticulous analysis of the work of the Nairobi STD/AIDS Research Group, which produced over two thirds of articles published on HIV or STDs in Kenyan women from the start of the HIV epidemic to the mid-1990s.

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Gowri Vijayakumar

Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching focus on gender, sexuality, politics, and globalization. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022). She also supported the writing of A Small Step in a Long Journey: A Memoir by Akkai Padmashali (Zubaan, 2022). Her articles and essays appear in Gender & Society, Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, World Development, and Signs.