Drawing on work with a Malawian LGBTI-rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), this article’s entry point is the “fake gay,” a person who, according to state political discourse and news media, allegedly fakes a marginalized sexual identity to gain access to foreign resources channeled through NGOs. For LGBTI-identified persons in the NGO’s orbit, meanwhile, fake gays—infiltrating inauthentic gays—breed fear and resentment amid circuits of scarce resource distribution and homophobia. This mythologized figure, rooted in racialized arbitrations of fake or real, sincere or cunning, reveals NGOs, dismissed in critical scholarship as “unqueer”—for spreading homonationalism, sapping radical agendas by institutionalizing liberal human rights frameworks, and smuggling in Euro-American logics of sexual modernity—to be unlikely sites of queer complexity. Reading NGO spaces as customary forms and drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic vignettes, the author shows how ritualized practices associated with audit culture in aid economies (monitoring and evaluation, paperwork, counting) operate as queer sites of multiplying possibilities and emergences. Rather than expose faking as duplicity or insincerity, the author argues that faking and normalizing practices rooted in logics of standardization, quantification, and replicability are co-constitutive. In addition to proposing the fake gay as a mode of theory that draws attention to (queer) world-making practices within postcolonial aid geographies, this article broadens understandings of the (queer) customary beyond narrowly defined cultural practices such as customs, rituals, and traditions.

As an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, critical global health studies reflects both changing modes of health practice and the centering of critique as a core anthropological endeavor. This special section seeks to analyze and reflect on the meanings, valences, affects, and entailments of anthropological critique, taking the rise of global health and flourishing of global health ethnography as key sites of investigation. Each of the contributing pieces is oriented around a global health object or technology.

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.

Capture‐recapture, a method devised for estimating wildlife population sizes using technologies like bird banding, has been repurposed for use with “rare and elusive” human populations. Capture‐recapture is implemented to count “key populations,” groups that constitute a small portion of the general population but are at high risk of HIV infection, including men who have sex with men. Drawing on ethnographic work in Malawi, I excavate mundane and oblique forms of capture (of labor, value, and viral material) and recapture (producing captive experimental populations) through which key populations come into being. Moving beyond the critical register of dehumanization (counting men as if they were animals) illuminates how efforts to count, care for, and keep track of key populations are mediated by relations of capture and elusion that are simultaneously predatory and capacitating, and entanglements that exceed the confines of a peculiar population‐size estimate method. [quantification, population, capture, global health, biopolitics, data, Malawi, Africa]