Sex worker activism, feminist discourse and HIV in Bangladesh

This paper explores the relationship between sex worker activism and HIV-related discourse in Bangladesh, relating recent developments in activism to the influence of feminist thought. Following their eviction in 1991 from brothels from red light areas, Bangladeshi sex workers started a social movement, at just about the same time that programmes started to work with sex workers to reduce the transmission of HIV. This paper argues that both sex worker activism and HIV-prevention initiatives find impetus in feminist pro-sex-work perspectives, which place emphasis on individual and collective agency. However, by participating in these programmes, sex workers failed to contest the imagery of themselves as ‘vectors’ of HIV. In this way, they were unwittingly complicit in reproducing their identity as ‘polluting others’. Moreover, by focusing on individual behaviour and the agency of sex workers, HIV programmes ignored the fact that the ‘choices’ made by sex workers are influenced by a wide range of structural and discursive factors, including gender norms and notions of bodily purity, which in turn have implications for the construction of HIV-related risk.