Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This seminar explores the discursive and practical marking of gay males, as targets of a series of biopolitical regimes whose aim, ostensibly, was and is to secure the health and wellbeing of the population. I begin by considering the emergence of “les fleaux sociales,” a rubric of French colonial invention of the late nineteenth century and the first such modern socio-medical category deployed in Indochina linking biology, technoscientific intervention and normative sexuality in the service of state power. The chapter traces the redeployment of this rubric by the socialist state throughout the twentieth century in a series of campaigns targeting the “social evils” (te nan xa hoi). These campaigns against sex workers, drug users, and briefly gay men, seriously exacerbated the marginalization and stigmatization of these groups, particularly with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam in 1990, and significantly compromised the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS programs for decades to come. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the contemporary apparatus constructed to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one funded by the US and that drew its legitimacy in part by aggressively undermining its “social evils”-based predecessor, did not in fact do away with these pernicious old forms, but reinscribed them with new language within a new regime that prioritizes quantification and technoscience. This chapter will use this minor history to interrogate the status of “our” science, aspects of the growing corpus of international best practice interventions in the field of HIV/AIDS, its metaphors, forms and uses, toward clarifying how we today know, produce and secure health in Vietnam, and how we might go about doing so in the future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alfred Montoya is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Sociology and Anthropology Department. His work concerns, broadly, the intersection of science, technology and society in the governance of epidemics in Southeast Asia. His dissertation focused on the history (and problematization) of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam within the context of competing regimes of politics, ethics and technology. Based on archival work and two years of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, this work tracked the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam, its casting by the state as a “social evil,” and its subsequent painstaking reproblematization under the US President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief. More recently, Montoya has taken up a related range of medical anthropological interests including work on the link between economic shifts within Asia and the illicit trade in wildlife; the intersection of human health and environmental sustainability; drugs and the drug trade in Southeast Asia; and the compounding effects of urban poverty on access to education, health services and proper nutrition. A native of San Antonio, Montoya is especially interested in forming partnerships with local agencies and the San Antonio community, developing opportunities for students to engage in community-based research projects through his fieldwork course.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.