:At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis

Abstract

Scholars and activists have extensively critiqued HIV prevention programs in India for depoliticizing and biomedicalizing sexuality while reinforcing caste and class boundaries. However, scholarship has also noted how AIDS programs have offered opportunities for political and social mobilization for the sexually marginalized. Gowri Vijayakumar’s recent book At Risk is a noteworthy addition to other outstanding ethnographic accounts, such as Cecilia Van Hollen’s Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India (2013) and Chaitanya Lakkimsetti’s Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India (2020), focusing on the social and political implications of AIDS in India. The book argues that the AIDS program in India brought about “political reconfigurations” as it “temporarily transformed the terrain on which sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people engaged the state, both individually and collectively” (p. 2). The book shows that sites of HIV prevention not only reproduced notions of gendered respectability, reinforcing caste and class hierarchies, but they also emerged as sites of contestation wherein some of the most marginalized communities comprising sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender persons demanded sociopolitical visibility and made citizenship claims on the state.