Trans-Health, Trans-Funding: Alternative Transnational Health Movements HIV Prevention Politics

• In Event: Spatiality and Transsexuality in American Studies: Sisterhood, Space, Place, and Belonging

Abstract

If trans health emerged in the United States from an infrastructure of feminist and LGBTQ alternative health movements, transnationally “trans health” has very different infrastructural and locational interests. This paper looks at health funding infrastructure to explore how they affect, and are affected by, geographically specific trans and gender nonconforming spaces, practices and identities. Currently, HIV prevention aid is one of the key avenues through which activists in the global south fund transgender-focused health projects. How do representational assumptions about transgender life made at the macro level of development affect political priorities? In this paper I argue that HIV prevention funding emerges as a key site through which transgender subjects across the world negotiate a transnational human rights framework based on respectability and individual entrepreneurialism. I interrogate the complex assemblage of global HIV prevention politics, global transgender health politics, and trans and gender nonconforming advocacy through a materialist lens. I trace not only the material connections between transgender non-governmental organizations and large-scale transnational shifts in HIV prevention and development aid, but how the actors—transgender activists and workers—negotiate, resist, and intervene in these large-scale movements of money, resources, and political will.

Author

• Aren Aizura, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities