Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in West Bengal, India, Akshay Khanna examines the conditions under which epidemiological knowledge about 'men who have sex with men' is produced and brought to circulate. He looks at conditions under which particular idioms of gender and sexuality are transformed into epidemiologically over-determined identity categories. The Sexual Subject that circulates in development praxis as an embodiment-in-the-world, it is argued, would be better understood in terms of the political economy that makes its intelligibility and circulation possible.