Abstract
Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research in Namibia, I examine the label ‘MSM’ through a materialist interpretation of affect, viewing ‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’ that unsettles the boundaries between subjects and objects. From this analytic perspective, I reconsider the ‘MSM’ label as an inadequate signifier that overlooks, conceals, or erases social complexity. Instead, this perspective reveals what happens when the MSM label travels, thereby better accounting for the socialities it is instrumental in making up. Its very design and appearance – which portray bodies and behaviours in universalistic ways – allow this ‘doing thing’ to gain entry to diverse spaces where it comes to exist alongside some contentious postcolonial political formations, such as those surrounding LGBT rights. I argue that although the label is designed to be insulated from politics, as a ‘neutral’ behavioural category, when ‘MSM’ travels it is still highly relational, continually entangling itself in contexts, stirring up postcolonial anxieties, and reinforcing global inequalities, while also setting the stage for global health worlds coming into being.
Highlights
In this essay, I analyze a noticeable shift I observed, between 2001 and 2012, in the research practices of the University of Namibia (UNAM) Department of Health Sciences based in Windhoek, Namibia, a shift that related to the possibility of doing HIV research with sexualnonconforming Africans.As a Canadian doctoral student in 2001, I began working with the UNAM health sciences faculty, comprised mostly of nursing professors, on a Fogarty-funded social science and qualitative research capacity-building project
One of the UNAM professors commented during a workshop, rather assuredly, ‘It is very interesting to hear about what has been happening in Canada, but homosexuality does not exist in Namibia the way it does in Canada and the US’
Over the past decade, the complex sociopolitical workings of community-based organizations that are led by sexual and gender nonconforming people throughout Asia and Africa – at the intersection of social movements and public health – I have noticed striking uniformities in the intervention discourses that pervade global health programs aimed to mitigate the HIV pandemic. This appearance of uniformity within activist organizations, at first glance, implies the depoliticization of LGBT rights, the domestication of sexual dissidence under the standardizing rule of a global health sovereign that seems to be remaking the world in its own scientific image
Summary
One of the UNAM professors commented during a workshop, rather assuredly, ‘It is very interesting to hear about what has been happening in Canada, but homosexuality does not exist in Namibia the way it does in Canada and the US’ This refusal aligned with global epidemiological declarations at the time that framed Africa as having a ‘heterosexual epidemic’ while largely denying the possibility of same-sex HIV transmission on the continent (Lorway 2006). Rather than insisting on how global health deployments of the MSM category obfuscate a fuller view of gender and sexual diversity in all its complexity, as many critical scholars do, I instead present an ethnographically based genealogy of the term ‘MSM’ to illuminate the work that this category does in opening up a field of possibilities for a diversity of social actors pursuing global health knowledge production enterprises, helping to account for what anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2011, 287) refers to as the accelerated or ‘untimely’ presence of the MSM category.
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