Legalizing Sex joins an ever-expanding body of literature on the gender and sexuality rights movements of South Asia and their contested negotiations with the nation-state. Deploying participant observation and in-depth interviews with policy makers, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) across several Indian cities, conducted sporadically between 2007 and 2015, and discourse analysis of legal documents and activist literatures, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti demonstrates that HIV transformed the relationship between the Indian state and queer, transgender, and sex-worker communities, whom she refers to as “sexual minorities” in shorthand.
The first two chapters, titled “HIV Is Our Friend” and “Challenging ‘Bare Life,’ ” respectively, mark a paradigm shift in the Indian state's HIV policy from one of denial and suppression to the creation of infrastructures that would facilitate its prevention. Lakkimsetti details the launch of India's National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) in 1994 and with it, the various phases of the...
