Saving Our Own Lives: Transnational AIDS Organizing at the Turn of the Century

• In Event: AIDS and the Crisis of American Empire

Abstract

This paper examines early organizing efforts bringing together sex workers, lawyers, and physicians in the United States and India under the auspices of AIDS prevention in the early 1990s. Bringing together archival research from the personal papers of pathbreaking HIV/AIDS researcher and clinical provider Joyce Wallace and a rich body of literature on the politics of transnational sex work, international labor law, and international development, this paper attempts to locate the foundational strands of a burgeoning global network rooted in transnational solidarity and post-colonial movement building.

The paper focuses in on several sites of gathering and early community formation, including the early work of what would come to be known as the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, the U.N. Conference on the Status of Women and Girls, and various International AIDS Conferences between the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century in order to reconstruct and analyze the role of sex workers within an increasingly complex network of NGO programs, international development projects, and grassroots direct action efforts to address the global AIDS epidemic.

Author

• Salonee Bhaman, New York University