The Logic of Verification
This chapter portrays some of the less publically visible forms of activism waged in relation to the use of bio-experimental technologies to deliver routine health services to sex worker communities in Nairobi, Kenya. What becomes clear is how HIV surveil
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The Logic of Verification
Abstract This chapter portrays some of the less publically visible forms of activism waged in relation to the use of bio-experimental technologies to deliver routine health services to sex worker communities in Nairobi, Kenya. What becomes clear is how HIV surveillance techniques in Nairobi have begun to transform the very ground on which local sex workers conceive of and enact political resistance, a transformation that has produced a terrain of evidentiary politics: the new frontiers of political dissent surrounding the social effects of the highly graduated forms of tracking, measuring, and managing life, used in the name of HIV prevention and care. Evidentiary politics is certainly akin to biopolitics in the way that life and life processes are positioned at the centre of political contestation and inherent in the very technologies that seek to govern community participation. However, contestation centres on the means, instruments, and aesthetics of evidence production itself. Keywords Biometrics • Clinical trials • Kenya • Men who have sex with men • Male sex workers • HIV
On September 18, 2009, 14 male sex workers living with HIV formed the organization Health Options for Young Men on HIV/AIDS and STIs (HOYMAS) by officially registering their collective as a CBO with the Kenya Ministry of Gender & Social Services. The collective started as a social support group with the aim of protecting their members from violence, providing care in times of sickness, and lending money in the event that one of them were running low on income. Initially members met in bars, pubs, and other places where they practised sex work. When I first met the founding members of HOYMAS in early 2010, they had begun to hold regular meetings in the board room of a sex worker clinic in Nairobi. From the time of its inception, the group quickly began to fill a gap in health services, providing vital support and health information to their clients and peers. They were also instrumental in helping the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) clinic, run jointly by the Universities of Nairobi and Manitoba, to assemble a male sex worker cohort in 2009, a study which found exceptionally high HIV and STI prevalence (McKinnon et al. 2014). This cohort of more than 500 men was soon to form HOYMAS’ membership base. In many ways the organization grew out of the HIV work they initiated in close collaboration with allied clinical scientists, coun-
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 R. Lorway, AIDS Activism, Science and Community Across Three Continents, Social Aspects of HIV 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42199-5_6
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The Logic of Verification
sellors, and government health officials that had long committed to working with sex workers. In 2011, HOYMAS was officially launched as a CBO. The head of the Most at Risk Populations (MARPS) unit with the National STI/AIDS Control Programme (NASCOP), HelgarMusyoki, made a public address, during which time she imparted advice on safer sex and ARV adherence to more
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