Gowri Vijayakumar - At Risk

Lekh

In the 29th episode, I speak to Gowri Vijayakumar, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, on her recent book At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis published by Stanford University Press in 2021. The book shows how India’s AIDS response from the 1990s onward presented opportunities for social and political mobilisation for sexually marginalised groups, in turn, affecting the Indian government's AIDS strategy and response; India’s AIDS strategies, unfolding within a global AIDS field, transformed the space on which sex workers, sexual minorities and other groups engaged the Indian state, generating new demands and claims being made. The conversation begins by asking how Vijayakumar got interested in these issues, global health, social movements, and India’s AIDS crisis. Next, Vijayakumar describes the state of India’s sexual politics before the AIDS crisis, focusing on the Indian states approach to issues like HIV/AIDS before presenting the book’s argument. Then, we discuss the relational aspect covered in the book, influence of India’s HIV strategies on Kenya. Vijayakumar explains why she used a global ethnographic approach that required unpacking different sites, their actors and motivations and what this approach adds to the narrative. The next part of the conversation focuses on what Vijayakumar’s book and work tells us about the Indian state - how it functions, responds, adapts, and the relationship between politics and how the state addresses public health challenges like AIDS. The conversation ends by exploring Vijayakumar’s fieldwork, the hardest part of writing the book, and her future work.