My research project is oriented towards a defamiliarization of the
spectacle and politics of HIV/AIDS in the non-west. I am interested in
the epidemiological, governmentalist and the literary discourses that
create HIV/AIDS as an experiential category at the periphery of the
modern Indian nation-state. My preliminary fieldwork (2008) was based
in eastern India in rural Orissa where I encountered the creation of
the HIV/AIDS subject at the crosshairs of west-funded identityspeak
(spearheaded by the NGOs) and the state's desire for recognition by
the international AIDS discourse. This initial work has enabled me to
approach the issue of peripheries both in terms of minority identity
groups like the hijras (the most vulnerable of the sexual minorities
in terms of HIV/AIDS in India) and the nation-state's periphery
symbolized in terms of their healthiness within the body-politic in
the national imagination. The state of Manipur in northeastern India
will be my area of research because of the meeting of the languages of
HIV/AIDS and of widespread alarm in the national media about
psychotropic drug addiction in the state. I am interested in this
spectacle of HIV/AIDS with the drug addict and the unhealthy sexual
dissident as its two discursive centers.
I hope to suspend disciplinary boundaries in my work having to
necessarily engage with the issue of borders and margins (India and
Myanmar, NGO activism and state interventionism) and with narratives
of subject production that will provide an ethical slant to my
research on HIV/AIDS, an aspect direly missing from the anthropology
of diseases in the third world. I am therefore interested in
non-western narratives of disease, infirmity and social
invisibilization. I engage centrally with psychoanalysis, literary
theory, ethics of care and feminist political theory in my research.
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