HIV/Aids, Sexuality and (Homo)Normativity in urban India: An exploration of HIV stigma in the treatment-as-prevention era among gay men in New Delhi

Fieldwork period: 10 July 2019 - 10 July 2020
Research summary
Welcome advances in treatment and prevention technologies, in particular the ability to achieve a supressed or 'undetectable' viral load through antiretroviral treatment and preventive pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), have in recent years led to much talk of 'an end to Aids' through aggressive test-and-treat policies, from proclamations about driving infections 'down to zero' among London's gay men to the Indian government's pledge to 'end Aids' by 2030. Weary of the way social and cultural understandings of HIV/Aids as also an 'epidemic of signification' are increasingly overshadowed by an medicalized emphasis on individual treatment adherence and viral load counts, social scientists have turned to the persistence of HIV stigma among gay men to question biomedicine's promissory discourse. They have focused almost exclusively on Anglo-American contexts, while anthropological scholarship on the social meanings of HIV/Aids in the Global South, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, tends to focus on the 'general', e.g. heterosexual, population. Scholarship on India is an important exception in this regard: ethnographers have demonstrated how the HIV prevention effort in India contributed to the circulation of a certain conception of sexuality-as-personhood in India, solidifying 'identities' in an effort to find culturally-relevant ways to address male-to-male transmission. Yet these scholars' critical attention to notions of risk as articulated by NGOs foreclosed a consideration of HIV/Aids impacts on the sexual subjectivities of middle to upper middle class gay men. If HIV vulnerability and stigma is, as anthropologists have tirelessly pointed out, shaped by 'structural violence' and maps on to the social fault lines of race, class, and caste that run through sexual minority communities, how does HIV/Aids' connotation with lower-caste and lower-class populations in India impact on the way middle class gay men view HIV/Aids and HIV-positive people? Conversely, what do HIV-positive gay men's experiences of stigma in the era of undetectability tell us about the way gay subjectivity in urban India relates to class, caste, linguistic markers and notions of citizenship? And if gay men are accessing PrEP, how does this emergence of what one sex work blogger calls a 'pharmasexual elite' impact male-to-male sexual and social relations? Do these new biomedical prevention technologies really eradicate stigma, as their advocates suggest, or does the imbrication of HIV/Aids with other forms social difference mean HIV/Aids remains socially significant despite its increasing medical normalization?
I will address these questions ethnographically through a 12-month fieldwork period in New Delhi, and possibly Bangalore if a multi-sited approach is necessary. The research will consist of interviews HIV-negative and positive gay men who may or may not be using PrEP, and participation with advocacy groups for HIV positive people and NGOs working on HIV prevention and care. The fieldwork started on the 10th of July of this year (2019) and will go on till the same date the next year (10/07/2020).