Locating HIV/AIDS and India: Cautionary Notes on the Globalization of Categories

Abstract

HIV/AIDS can now be considered a pandemic as it affects all parts of the world. As attentive as scholars have been to the biomedical and epidemiological aspects of the disease, they have been slower to try to understand it as a disease of transnational significations or meanings. This article looks to the ways that the conceptual categories of HIV/AIDS came to India in the biomedical literature, the approaches that the media in the United States and India took in contending with these meanings, and how these categories travel globally in dominant and negotiated realms of discourse. Throughout this analysis, attention is paid to ways that high-risk groupings obscure alternative approaches based on understandings of the dynamics of poverty, history, gender, and culture. Finally, this article argues that critical approaches to science and medicine are essential to help produce a more complex science.