Subalternity and sex work: Re(scripting) contours of health communication in the realm of HIV /AIDS

Ambar Basu, Purdue University

Abstract

This study seeks to understand and document how sex workers in a community in Kalighat, India communicate about health and HIV/AIDS. Sex worker voices have been largely erased from mainstream HIV/AIDS discourse, which has sought to instruct them and persuade them about increased condom use and regular HIV screenings. This study aims to question the absence of sex worker voices in the dominant HIV/AIDS discourse by locating how sex workers inscribe cultural understandings at the core of their HIV/AIDS-related practices. The culture-centered approach to health communication provides the theoretical lens and the methodological framework for this study because it calls for a recalibration of mainstream health discourse in terms of culture, structure, and the enactment of participant agency. I conducted an eight-week field study in the Kalighat sex worker community, over which I engaged in 46 face-to-face interviews and wrote reflexive journal entries and field notes. I learnt that communication on HIV/AIDS in the Kalighat sex worker community is navigated around an autonomous consciousness. This autonomous rationality is locally constituted and is enacted through an engagement with local cultural meanings, availability of healthful structures, and through contested communication modalities of resistance, assimilation, and restructuring of the dominant discourse. Key to this fractured HIV/AIDS discourse is New Light (a NGO) and a community participatory effort it initiates and partakes in. It is through an understanding of this local participatory discourse that my study contributes, in several meaningful ways, to research and praxis on HIV/AIDS communication in sex worker spaces.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dutta, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication

COinS