The MSM category as bureaucratic technology

Abstract

The MSM category has traveled far and wide from its invention in US public health worlds in the late-1990s, migrating as well into anthropological scholarship that is critical of its reductionist, biomedicalized, Western, and de-eroticizing logics. While much has been written about ‘MSM’ as a flawed category that misdirects resources in health worlds, or as an imported nominalization that grafts awkwardly onto ‘real’, local, sexual, and gendered selves, my interest in this article is in revisiting the MSM category as a technology that facilitates linkages, processes, and dynamics constituting projects that take form in performance-based aid economies. Long-term, if episodic, work within projects targeting MSM deepens our understandings of the transformations and travels of the MSM category, beyond the dominant biomedical and cultural frames that characterize most anthropological literature. After briefly describing an NGO focused on LGBTI rights that I work with in Malawi, I present vignettes to analyze the work done by the MSM category in sociotechnical infrastructures. I closely read paperwork practices in NGO worlds to illustrate how the MSM category operates as a bureaucratic technology and a unit of accounting and measurement that is the engine behind the reproduction and performativity of projects. Throughout, I highlight how the patchy, contingent, frenetic, and unpredictable rhythms of aid economies are crucial context for understanding the workings of the MSM category. Finally, I reflect on how anthropologists’ embeddedness in such projects might reconfigure the meanings, tempos, and methods of anthropological work and writing.