The MSM category as bureaucratic technology

Abstract

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.

Aid Unchained: Examining Development Project Management Practices at Aid Chain Interfaces

“…Reporting is thus a joint production that links stakeholders by creating a common version of project realities. Biruk (2019: 204) specifically points to this performative dimension of paperwork, stating that ‘it is less important what documents stand for than how they arrange people around themselves’. A comment in one of the reports reveals that this is not only with regard to the lived events, but also with regard to other project documents: ‘Explain how these norms and attitudes are shifting.…”

Anachronic: Viral Socialities and Project Time among HIV Support Groups in Barbados

“…Thus, PLHIV activism and greater participation in HIV response initiatives (locally, nationally, and globally) have been increasingly incorporated into plans and budgets of inter/national HIV responses (Marsland 2018: 478–79) since the 1990s, best illustrated through the now common presence of GIPA/MIPA (greater involvement of people with HIV/AIDS; meaningful involvement of people with HIV/AIDS) principles in many HIV/AIDS agencies’ project plans and reports. As GIPA/MIPA principles were incorporated into HIV/AIDS funding protocols, an HIV+ status increasingly became a qualification for getting salaried work, stipends, or allowances in organizations where PLHIV had been volunteers before, so an HIV+ status could now accrue moral and economic value (Whyte 2014: 65, 186–87; see also Benton 2015, Biruk 2019, and Carruth 2018). Similar to Biruk and Trapence's discussion of engaging LGBTI persons in an LGBTI‐rights NGO in Malawi, the gradual incorporation of PLHIV support groups and CSOs into the projects and budgets of global HIV interventions transformed PLHIV subjectivities and relationships, support groups’ organizational cultures, and relations with local health systems (Biruk and Trapence 2018: 346; Reed 2018).…”