The speaker will be Andrew Wortham (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society), who will present on "Watering-Down” Strict HIV Testing Quotas on Chinese Men Who Have Sex with Men Community-Based Organizations at 11:15 AM on Thursday, 9 November in Room W934. Click here to RSVP for in-person attendance.
“Watering-Down” Strict HIV Testing Quotas on Chinese Men Who Have Sex with Men Community-Based Organizations
The Chinese Center for Disease Control employs Community-Based Organizations (CBO) to conduct mass testing on “hidden” Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). Testing MSMs is intended to make risky bodies legible to the state and discipline the CBOs around narrow health goals. However, detailed ethnographic fieldwork with MSM CBOs in southwest China demonstrates that pressures to achieve HIV testing quotas produce the need to “water-down” or manipulate data. This distorts the identities and practices of MSMs from state surveillance and builds collusive partnerships between CBOs and low-level government officials to mitigate the disciplinary impacts of strict audits.
Andrew Wortham is an applied anthropologist and post-doctoral GPS fellow at NYU Shanghai. He researches HIV/AIDs prevention organizations and LGBT politicking in Yunnan, China. His work theorizes the concept of ‘collusion’ as a political tactic in China which allows LGBT organizers to use demands for HIV testing quotas as a way to develop critical working relationships and resources from the state.